Via WaPo:
Did the Supreme Court just make the Affordable Care Act much less affordable?
The calculations are complex, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said it will need some time to review the situation. But an early back-of-the-envelope analysis by a former CBO director suggests that Thursday’s ruling could sharply raise the cost of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin now serves as president of the conservative American Action Forum, which filed several amicus briefs in support of overturning the health-care law. Holtz-Eakin, who advised 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain before he lost to Obama, is no friend of the administration.
Still, he asks a relevant question: Given the terms of the ruling, what’s the worst-case scenario for the federal budget? His answer: around $50 billion a year.
“There’s real money at stake here,” Holtz-Eakin said.
How does it work? The Affordable Care Act seeks to cover the uninsured in two ways: It requires states to expand Medicaid to cover those earning less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level, with the federal government initially picking up the full tab (though federal funding would later fall to cover just 90 percent of the cost of expansion). It also creates new subsidies to help people at slightly higher income levels afford private insurance on new insurance exchanges.