On July 3, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) made public a new assessment of title I of the Affordable Health Choices Act, the Senate HELP Committee health reform bill, focusing on newly-released health insurance coverage provisions (insurance market reforms, insurance exchange, public plan option, and insurance mandates). The CBO estimates that the bill would increase the deficit by $597 billion over the 2010-2019 period— but that does not reflect the costs of the Medicaid expansion and certain other low-income subsidies (or any of the numerous Medicare, quality improvement, workforce, or public health provisions under consideration). Note that this estimated cost is roughly $400 billion less over 10 years than the cost CBO estimated for an earlier version of the proposal, mainly because the insurance subsidies would be less expensive, a penalty was added for employers that do not offer insurance coverage to their workers, and subsidies to employees with access to employer-sponsored insurance were limited. CBO estimates that the bill would reduce the uninsured population by about 20 million when fully implemented, but 34 million people would still be uninsured.
