The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published its estimate of the Reid Bill’s effect on health insurance premiums in 2016. It found that those who purchase insurance on their own would face premiums 10% to 13% higher after reform than they would have without reform – assuming they are even able to stay in the nongroup market and are not forced to take their employer’s plan.

The new plans will cover more and will be subsidized with tax dollars from the other pocket, so CBO and other optimists think there will be little chance of people waiting to purchase insurance until they are sick.

The important section of the paper, however, is not CBO’s estimate, but CBO’s confidence in its estimate.


All of those considerations serve to emphasize the considerable uncertainty that surrounds any estimate of the impact of any proposal that would make substantial changes in the health insurance or health care sectors, given the size and the complexity of those sectors. That uncertainty applies to the estimated effects of proposals on the federal budget and insurance coverage rates, as well as to their impact on premiums.

To bowdlerize a phrase from one of the climategate emails, “i.e., we know with certainty that we know [nothing].”