CBO Report on the AHCA

The White House and Republican leaders knew that the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of their American Health Care Act was not going to be helpful. They have laid the groundwork for rejecting the CBO numbers well in advance, with press secretary Sean Spicer disparaging the CBO's prior estimates last week, and a slew of administration and House officials appeared on the Sunday talk shows to set expectations for viewers.

So, was the Congressional Budget Office really “way, way off … in every aspect” of how it predicted that Obamacare would work, as the White House claims? No, it wasn’t.

The CBO actually nailed the overall impact of the law on the uninsured pretty closely. It predicted a big drop in the percentage of people under age 65 who would lack insurance, and that turned out to be the case. CBO projected that in 2016 that nonelderly rate would fall to 11%, and the latest figure put the actual rate...