InsuranceNewsNet quoted Manatt’s Joel Ario, a managing director with Manatt Health, in an article about the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) report that stated 32 million Americans would have lost coverage and premiums would have doubled in less than ten years if Republicans had repealed the Affordable Care Act in 2016.
The CBO’s numbers were based on an ACA repeal without a replacement plan in effect because no replacement was offered in 2016, said Ario—“We don’t know what we’re looking at as far as replacement. All we know is what would happen with repeal.”
Ario also noted that the 2016 repeal effort set forth a two-year delay on implementing that repeal, giving Congress time to come up with a replacement.
“If they are going to have a delay this time, they can’t wait until the end of the delay period to enact a bill because it will take some time to implement the replacement,” he said. “Remember that under the current bill, it was passed in March 2010 and wasn’t ready to implement until the fall of 2013.”