My colleague Avik Roy has suggested that passing a full Obamacare replacement (as opposed to a partial replacement passed via reconciliation) might be possible even though it would require Democratic votes to obtain the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, and that a pre-condition to achieving that would require the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score the replacement as covering at least as many people as the Obamacare does.
As if to give a warning shot across the Republican bow, the officially non-partisan CBO warned that it “would not count those people with limited health benefits as having coverage” when evaluating changes to the health care law, and that changes to the “essential health benefits” required under the ACA could result in people receiving tax credits to help pay for health insurance under a new law, but being counted as not having health insurance according to the CBO, if the coverage they have doesn’t meet the CBO’s requirements. At issue, basically, is “What is health insurance?”
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