The CBO is out this afternoon with its latest round of estimates — this time, on what the Senate health-care bill would mean for health-insurance premiums. The short answer: Not much, for most working people.
The long answer is more complicated, so we’ll break it down into the three categories the CBO uses. The estimates compare premiums in 2016 under the Senate bill versus premiums in 2016 under current law.
Premiums for people who get health insurance through a large group (including companies with more than 50 people) would be unchanged, or maybe a little lower, under the Senate bill. People in this category account for 70% of the nonelderly population CBO looked at.
Premiums for people who get insurance through a small group would also be largely unchanged. But a small percentage of people who get insurance through a small group would be eligible for insurance subsidies, and those people would see their rates fall by about 10%.
Premiums for people who buy health insurance on the individual market would go up by 10% or more. But the majority of people in this category would be eligible for subsidies, and those people would wind up paying nearly 60% less, on average, under the Senate bill, because of the effect of the subsidies.
For more details on these numbers, see the table on page 5 of the CBO’s estimate. The subsidies are based on income, and explained in detail in Table 2 on the last page of the estimate.
As always, these sorts of estimates — both for what premiums would be under current law, and for what they’d be under the senate health bill — are subject to plenty of uncertainty, so take them with a grain of salt. But you already knew that.
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