The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has issued a document entitled “Updated Estimates of the Effects of the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act, April 2014”.

I quote (some posts are easier to write than others):

Relative to their previous projections, CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] now estimate that the ACA’s coverage provisions will result in lower net costs to the federal government: The agencies now project a net cost of $36 billion for 2014, $5 billion less than the previous projection for the year; and $1,383 billion for the 2015–2024 period, $104 billion less than the previous projection….

CBO and JCT estimate that the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will increase the proportion of the non-elderly population with insurance from roughly 80 percent in the absence of the ACA to about 84 percent in 2014 and to about 89 percent in 2016 and beyond… CBO and JCT project that 12 million more non-elderly people will have health insurance in 2014 than would have had it in the absence of the ACA. They also project that 19 million more people will be insured in 2015, 25 million more will be insured in 2016, and 26 million more will be insured each year from 2017 through 2024 than would have been the case without the ACA.

In other words, the Affordable Care Act will cost less and result in more people having health insurance than previously estimated. Given these very encouraging new estimates, leading Republicans are reconsidering their short-sighted, hypocritical opposition to “Obamacare”. (I made up that last part.)