Biden’s Health Insurance Plan Would Grow The Deficit By $335 Billion In 10 Years

Four presidential elections ago, Barack Obama won the White House in part by promising that under his health care plan, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” It ended up not being true, of course — so much so that Politifact made this claim its “Lie of the Year” for 2013.

Fast forward over a decade, and Joe Biden is promoting proposals that would again put millions of Americans’ health coverage in his sights. Democrats’ plan to extend a “temporary” increase in Obamacare subsidies would lead to significant amounts of new federal spending, even as it further undermines the system by which most Americans obtain insurance.

Employers Dropping Coverage

Just before the Independence Day holiday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a detailed estimate requested by two House committee chairmen about the cost of extending the increased Obamacare subsidies. The higher subsidies for Exchange coverage, first included in Democrats’ partisan “stimulus” bill in early 2021, were extended for an additional three years in 2022. As such, the subsidies now expire at the end of 2025 — at the same time as many provisions of the 2017 Trump tax relief package.

CBO found that the increase in Exchange subsidies would lead to a “3.5 million decrease in enrollment in employment-based coverage.” The budget office explained that “the decline in employment-based coverage would be larger under a permanent [subsidy] extension,” because “more employers would change their offers of health insurance if the policy became permanent.” In other words, if you like your plan, tough luck — your employer could cancel it for you.

Also worth noting: CBO concluded that, on net, extending the subsidies would increase the number of insured Americans by 3.4 million — a number smaller than the 3.5 million who will lose employer-based coverage under the proposal.

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