The Senate's health care bill to replace Obamacare was the focus of lots of people last week, and PolitiFact, too. We looked at comments about the bill by three prominent politicians, and found a little truth. Here are abbreviated versions of our fact checks. Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com.
The Senate bill “hands enormous tax cuts to the rich and to the drug and insurance industries, paid for by cutting health care for everybody else.”
— Barack Obama on Thursday, June 22nd, 2017 in a Facebook post
Obama is right that the Senate bill contains a tax cut for wealthy Americans and medical-related businesses. The amount will likely be in the same ballpark as the House bill, which cut taxes by about $1 trillion over 10 years, with high-income households and the health care industry gaining most of those benefits, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Obama is correct that tax cuts would be offset by cutting spending on health care. But it’s a stretch to say everybody’s health care would suffer, when what’s on the chopping block is federal funding for lower-income Americans.
Our ruling
The Senate bill does give a tax cut to wealthy Americans and medical-related industry. It’s a bit hyperbolic to say everybody’s health care would be cut to finance the tax cut; it’s mostly lower-income people who lose out as a direct result of the bill. Obama is right that the Senate bill would deliver a tax cut as it reduces the federal funding lower-income Americans would get to help buy insurance. The bill would also repeal funding to defray deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for those eligible. It also lessens the share of Medicaid funding carried by the federal government, relative to states.
We rate Obama’s statement Mostly True.
The CBO said “it’s not that people are getting pushed off a plan; it’s that people will choose not to buy something they don’t like or want.”
— Paul Ryan on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 in an interview with Fox News
In terms of 22 million fewer insured, the CBO did not say people will choose not to buy insurance. Ryan's press office said he was talking about the first year after the bill would take effect, and there, he has a point. The CBO said it and the Joint Committee on Taxation "estimate that, in 2018, 15 million more people would be uninsured under this legislation than under current law — primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated."
But the 22 million figure is the estimate for 2026. It was the sum of two groups — a Medicaid group totalling 15 million people, and the non-group insurance market amounting to 7 million people.
According to the CBO, the Senate bill’s impact is twice as big on people who would get coverage through Medicaid than for people who buy on the insurance market. That’s where people make the kind of choices Ryan was talking about. On top of that, the CBO says people currently eligible for Medicaid represent about two-thirds of the projected drop in Medicaid enrollment. But even for the smaller group of 7 million people in the nongroup insurance market, Ryan’s answer oversimplifies the CBO message.
Our ruling
Ryan paraphrased the CBO as saying that millions more would not be insured basically because they wouldn’t have to buy a policy they didn’t want. But many people will become uninsured because they’re no longer eligible for Medicaid. The CBO said two-thirds of the 22 million without insurance would lose out through cuts in the Medicaid program. Some of the remaining 7 million would have chosen not to buy coverage, but some would want to buy but find insurance unaffordable.
Ryan’s claim contains an element of truth but ignores a lot of what the CBO said.
We rate this claim Mostly False.
“When Obamacare was signed into law, CBO estimated that 23 million people would be covered in Obamacare’s exchanges in 2017. They were off by more than 100 percent. Only 10.3 million people are covered by Obamacare.”
— Donald Trump on Monday, June 26th, 2017 in in a tweet
We found that the CBO report written after Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010 indeed estimated 23 million people would participate in marketplace exchanges. According to the latest figures, only 10.3 million currently participate in those marketplaces.
The talking point neglects to mention, however, the CBO report’s accuracy in predicting the uninsured population at a historic low. Given the information available at the time, the agency offered projections closer to reality than any other forecaster.
Our ruling
The Trump administration cherry-picked a statistic that CBO got the most wrong. The forecasters were closer to actual results on other major components of Obamacare, including Medicaid and employer changes.
We rate this statement Half True.
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