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CBO: Senate health bill costs $871 billion
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12/19/09 12:00 PM ET
The Senate's healthcare bill would cost $871 billion and cover 31 million more people, according to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the bill.
The CBO said that the final legislation, unveiled Saturday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, would cost $871 billion over the next 10 years and reduce the deficit by $132 billion over the same period. That's more than the first Senate bill had cost.
Roughly 31 million people would receive new coverage under the legislation.
That bill contained an opt-our public option for consumers, a provision that was eliminated in the current bill.
The House healthcare bill, which passed 220-215 last month, checked in at a final tally of 2,014 pages. The CBO pegged that bill's cost at $894 billion over 10 years though it found that the measure would not add to the federal deficit over that same period.
Republicans had demanded that the bill be available to the public on the Internet a full 72 hours before the House voted on a final version, a demand the GOP has also made of the Senate bill.
The Senate legislation has changed during 17 days of debate and amendments, most notably in Reid's decision to drop the opt-out public option provision in favor of one that would allow individuals between ages 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare.
The health bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee in October was 1,504 pages long and a price tag of $829 billion. The bill crafted by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, passed in July, totaled 615 pages and a cost of $1 trillion, the most of the proposed bills.
Noting many offsets in the legislation, CBO found all of these bills would not add to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. Republicans have charged Democrats have used accounting gimmicks to mask the real cost of their efforts to overhaul the nation's healthcare system.
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