Ezra Klein points out the new budget numbers on the Senate's HELP bill:
The big news of the morning is a new versionof the Senate HELP Committee's health-care reform bill that seems tohave everyone confused. The short version is this: CBO estimates thatby 2019 the bill will cover 21 million people at a cost of $597billion. But — and this is important — the HELP Committee's billdoesn't include the Medicaid expansion, because Medicaid is under thesole jurisdiction of the Finance Committee. But if Medicaid is expandedto 150 percent, it will cover an additional 20 million at a cost ofabout $1 trillion. Add in the savings that Finance is expected to getfrom reforming Medicare and you're looking at a bill that will cost $1trillion to $1.3 trillion and cover 42 million people (which would mean97 percent of the legal population in 2019 would have health insurance)by 2019.
The importance of this set of numbers can be understood only interms of the catastrophe that was the last set of numbers. On June 15,the Congressional Budget Office scoredan incomplete version of this bill. The office estimated that it wouldcost $1 trillion over 10 years and cover 16 million people. It would'vecost, in other words, 70 percent more and covered 20 percent fewerpeople. The big question, then, is what accounts for the change? Andluckily, there's a simple answer: the employer mandate. …
But oh, what a difference a mandate makes: The new version of theHELP bill includes an employer mandate for firms with more than 25workers. Every full-time worker who isn't given health-care coveragetriggers a penalty of $750. Every part-time employee not given coveragecosts $375. Doesn't seem like very much, does it? But it's enough. InMassachusetts, the employer mandate has been a success with a piddling$295 penalty. Indeed, the evidence we have suggests that the smallpenalty creates a massive change in behavior. …