Budget Analysis of Health Care Law

A year after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there's still a need for studies of its potential impact.

The Congressional Budget Office—a non-partisan office of Congress—prepared a number of analyses during the consideration of the law and earlier proposals. Now we have a handy compilation of these reports: Selected CBO Publicaitions Related to Health Care Legislation 2009-2010:

Responding to many requests, this report compiles a set of those estimates and analyses for easy reference. The report begins with the cost estimate for the final legislation and several analyses related to that legislation. It also includes several cost estimates and analyses of earlier versions of that legislation and alternative proposals that were considered in the House and Senate before final passage. In addition, this report brings together analyses that CBO issued during this period concerning insurance premiums and premium subsidies, the budgetary accounting of proposals, changes to the medical malpractice system, and certain related topics that arose during the Congressional debate. A number of related cost estimates and publications are not included in this volume but are available on CBO’s Web site. In keeping with CBO’s mandate to provide objective, nonpartisan analysis, this report makes no recommendations.

It's available in PDF on the CBO's website, if you want to read it online or download it to your laptop or other device. Or you can check out the library's print copy (RA410.53 .S428 2010 at Classified Stacks), because sometimes it's handier to flip through pages of budget analysis than to navigate through a long document online.

If you want to stay on top of this issue, you can follow the CBO Director's blog. The posts on health are here. The latest entry is Revisions to CBO’s Estimates of the Cost of Last Year’s Major Health Care Legislation, March 23, 2011.

In its ongoing monitoring of developments, CBO has seen no evidence to date that the steps that will be taken to implement the legislation—or the ways in which participants in the health care and health financing systems will respond to the legislation—will yield overall budgetary effects that differ significantly from the ones projected earlier. Therefore, the evolution of the estimates does not reflect any substantial change in the estimation of the overall effects of PPACA and the Reconciliation Act from what was projected in March 2010.