The Congressional Budget Office, which originally estimated that the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," would reduce the national debt by $120 billion, now says it has no way of estimating the cost of the new health care law.
CBO's new outlook on the ACA's costs was buried in a footnote to an April 14 report. It was first reported Wednesday by Roll Call's Paul M. Krawzak.
"CBO and [Joint Committee on Taxation] can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the ACA that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues. The provisions that expanded coverage established entirely new programs or components of programs that can be isolated and reassessed. Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on previously existing programs and revenues four years after enactment of the ACP is not possible," the footnote read.
When President Barack Obama was trying to get the law passed in 2010, he frequently cited a CBO report estimating that the law would reduce the deficit by $210 billion over 10 years.
Republicans argued at the time that the estimate was wrong because the CBO was double counting cuts to Medicare as both reducing the deficit and funding other programs in the law. (An independent actuary hired by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2011 confirmed that money used to fund other programs in the law cannot simultaneously be used to lower deficits.)
The costs of the ACA are hard to estimate, in part, because President Barack Obama keeps making changes to the law, 41 changes so far,according to the Galen Institute. Many of these changes change the law's financial impact.