MASSDEVICE ON CALL — The Congressional Budget Office is looking to pour cold water on Republican attempts to repeal the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act in advance of today’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In a letter to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), CBO director Doug Elmendorf warned the former vice presidential hopeful that repealing the landmark healthcare law would result in "a net increase in budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2013-2022 period."
Ryan had requested the CBO provide an updated estimate of expenses associated with repealing Obamacare on Thursday, but Elmendorf warned that there was simply no time for such an endeavor.
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"Preparing a new estimate of the budgetary impact of repealing the Affordable Care Act would take considerable time – probably several weeks – for CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, because there are hundreds of provisions in the ACA and those provisions are already in various stages of implementation," he wrote. "Moreover, we have just finished the time-consuming task of updating our baseline budget projections and need to finish our analysis of the President’s budgetary proposals."
Thursday’s vote on Capitol Hill will mark be the 37th time that Republicans have sought to repeal or strip funding of the ACA, according to The Hill.
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