Dems get CBO scores on what they think skinny bill will look like

Repealing ObamaCare’s individual and employer mandates would result in 16 million additional people without insurance by 2021, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates released by Senate Democrats.

Senate Republicans are running out of options to use for ObamaCare repeal, and momentum for a bare-bones ObamaCare repeal plan is growing. But senators don’t know for sure what the final bill will look like.

It’s widely believed the skinny bill would repeal ObamaCare’s individual and employer mandates, as well as a tax on medical devices, but the final version won’t be released until the end of a marathon voting session expected to begin tomorrow.

{mosads}As a way to draw attention to that lack of transparency, Senate Democrats asked the CBO to score the impact of repealing those policies.

It’s not clear if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has the votes yet to pass a skinny repeal bill, and Democrats are hoping the CBO score might convince more Republicans to kill it.

Democrats also asked the CBO to score the impact of defunding Planned Parenthood, the repeal of ObamaCare’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, and the repeal of the Community Health Center Fund.

Most of those provisions were included in the 2015 ObamaCare repeal bill that passed Congress.

According to a senior Democratic aide, the CBO told Senate Democrats that if all those policies were in a “skinny” repeal bill, premiums would be about 20 percent higher each year than under current law.