The Unaffordable Care Act
Photo Credit: APThe Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report Tuesday showing that if cost-control measures are not maintained the Affordable Care Act could increase the deficit by $6.2 trillion, or .7 percent of GDP, over the next 75 years.
The report shows President Barack Obama’s comments that Obamacare would “not add a dime to the long term debt [are] false,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) said at a Budget Committee hearing.
“The result of this brand new report confirmed everything that Republicans were saying about the bill,” Sessions said. The report is the first to look at the long-term effects of the Affordable Care Act beyond a ten-year period.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) previously had projected the cost of Obamacare over a ten-year period and found it would save more than $100 billion if certain policies remained the same—policies that CBO director Doug Elmendorf said would be hard to maintain.
“CBO’s cost estimate noted that the legislation maintains and puts into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time,” Elmendorf said at the time. The new GAO study ran two projections: one in which those cost reduction policies were maintained and another projection in which Congress phased out the reduction policies put into Obamacare.
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