Obamacare is just the beginning of healthcare reform: Holtz-Eakin

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is back in the spotlight once again. This time it’s under dissection by both the Congressional Budget Office and the Supreme Court.

The highest court in the U.S. will decide on King vs. Burwell before the end of June. The case could potentially end the subsidies of 6.4 million Americans who buy their health care through the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile, the CBO has released an analysis on the costs of repealing Obamacare-- a repeal that it says could add $137 billion to the U.S. deficit over the next 10 years. The number comes from an estimated $353 billion in deficits and an economic boost from increased supply of labor that would remove $216 billion from the deficit.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the American Action Forum and former director of the CBO, chooses to focus on the increased supply of labor. “The CBO has said definitively for the first time that the Affordable Care Act is harming economic growth in the United States,” he tells Yahoo Finance. “Most of this hinges on what you chose to believe about the future of the Medicare cuts…The real question is, 'Do you believe that we’re going to cut $800 billion out of Medicare in the next ten years?'  If you do, then repealing the ACA gets rid of those cuts.”

Holtz-Eakin believes that the CBO report is fuel for those calling to repeal Obamacare. “Many people have suspected for a long time that the combination of higher taxes, entitlement expansion, [and] a very large regulatory burden was harming the U.S. economy.”

The CBO does note that undoing the ACA would be incredibly complicated and would present challenges since. In their report they write, “In the five years since its enactment, nearly every key provision of the law has taken effect and has been incorporated into final rules and other administrative actions.” Holtz-Eakin agrees that unwinding a large bureaucracy is difficult and proposes to replace ACA subsidies with subsidies based on people’s age and the risk that comes with age and other Republican-proposed alternatives.

“We will have in the future something that’s not the ACA whether it’s because the ACA gets repealed or replaced or because in the future the ACA gets modified,” he says. “Nobody believes this is the end of healthcare reform.  It’s probably just the beginning.”

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