Schumer: CBO Says Trumpcare Won’t Help Counties Without Insurers

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today released the statement below regarding the CBO report which says Trumpcare will not help counties currently without insurers serving the marketplace:

“Time and time again, Republicans have said they need to jam Trumpcare through because there were counties around the country that didn’t have any insurer offering a plan, and they wanted to fix that. Today, the CBO made clear that Trumpcare doesn’t lift a finger to solve that problem. The Republicans’ entire professed rationale for acting turned out to be nothing more than a hoax.

“This bill is fundamentally a massive cut in health care to provide huge tax breaks to the rich. It’s no wonder that it won’t fix the problems in our health care system, and makes many of them worse. Instead of rushing this bill through, Republicans should stop going down this partisan path and work with Democrats to improve our health care system.”

CBO: In the agencies’ assessment, a small fraction of the population resides in areas in which — because of this legislation, at least for some of the years after 2019 — no insurers would participate in the nongroup market or insurance would be offered only with very high premiums. Some sparsely populated areas might have no nongroup insurance offered because the reductions in subsidies would lead fewer people to decide to purchase insurance — and markets with few purchasers are less profitable for insurers. Insurance covering certain services would become more expensive — in some cases, extremely expensive — in some areas because the scope of the EHBs would be narrowed through waivers affecting close to half the population, CBO and JCT expect. In addition, the agencies anticipate that all insurance in the nongroup market would become very expensive for at least a short period of time for a small fraction of the population residing in areas in which states’ implementation of waivers with major changes caused market disruption.

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