The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a respected group of budget hawks, is out with its own estimate of the cost of repealing Obamacare. It has lots of different scenarios — full repeal, partial repeal — and is kind of hard to follow.
The key numbers:
- If they repeal everything (unlikely): Costs $350 billion over 10 years
- If they just repeal the coverage provisions (unlikely): Saves $1.6 trillion over 10 years
- If they repeal the coverage and taxes, but keep the Medicare payment cuts (more likely): Saves $750 billion over 10 years
- The group says repeal would increase the uninsured by 23 million.
Takeaway: The Medicare payment cuts are important to this. That's one reason House Speaker Paul Ryan's repeal plans always kept the savings.