Would the Senate HCR bill actually help most people with their health care costs? (contd.)

That's a question that Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight answered with a resounding yes.

Now Jonathan Cohn (of the New Republic) and Jonathan Gruber (of MIT) did the calculations, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, and Matthew Yglesias turned the results into a bar graph. Again, the answer seems to be yes.

(As with Nate Silver's estimates, these are cost projections for 2016. The 2009 Federal Poverty Line for a family of 4 is an annual income of about $22,000; according to the figures in the Cohn & Gruber table, Gruber seems to have estimated the corresponding FPL in 2016 at around $24,200.)

--Jeff Weintraub
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Matthew Yglesias
Monday, December 21, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Health Reform Will Save Families Money

Left-critics of the health reform bill have done a good job of pointing out that even with reform, decent health insurance may not meet everyone’s standard of “affordable” for many middle class families. That said, the relevant question here is “compared to what?” Jon Cohn and Jonathan Gruber pulled together a big table showing how families of four would fare with and without reform. My value-added is to turn it into a bar graph:



Big savings! Good stuff.