A widely circulated talking point about Medicaid cuts inflates the legislation’s effects by about five million people.
On Sunday, Republicans released their package of proposals to cut federal spending on Medicaid and Obamacare. Shortly afterward, Democrats and left-leaning organizations released a torrent of news releases and social media posts, all with the same claim: that the legislation would cause 13.7 million Americans to become uninsured.
It’s a striking number — a figure almost as large as the number of Americans who would have lost coverage if Republicans had succeeded in passing their third attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017.
But in this case, the number is an exaggeration. The real number is about 8.6 million, not 13.7 million.
Here’s where it comes from: On Sunday night, the Democrats from the Energy and Commerce Committee released a letter from the Congressional Budget Office summarizing the legislation’s effects. The analysis considered the type of scenario the budget office often measures: What would be the effects of the legislation itself, compared with what would happen if the bill did not pass? The budget office concluded that the bill would mean 8.6 million fewer Americans would have health insurance than would under current law.
But because Democratic lawmakers had asked for a second set of numbers, the budget office supplied those, too. (The budget office, which works for Congress, routinely answers questions from lawmakers like this.)
Democrats asked the analysts to add together the effects of the new provisions and the effects of another policy if it expires at the end of the year as scheduled. If you add the 8.6 million to the people expected to lose coverage when that policy expires, the budget office estimated a total of 13.7 million people would be uninsured.