CBO Pegs Cost Of Senate Health Bill At $829 Billion

The most anticipated numbers since the tally of votes in this year's "American Idol" are out: the Congressional Budget Office score of the Senate Finance Committee's health overhaul bill.

And the news for Chairman Max Baucus (D, Mont.) is mostly good. CBO says his revised overhaul plan would cost a total of $829 billion over 10 years, well under the $900 billion goal set by President Obama. (See the CBO blog here for more info and read the letter here.)

Even better, the CBO figures the Baucus plan would reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion over the next decade. Although CBO isn't really supposed to make projections longer than 10 years into the future, the number-crunchers expect the bill would probably reduce federal deficits beyond 2019, too. All that bodes well for a committee vote by the end of the week to send the bill to the Senate floor for debate.

The not so good news, though, is that CBO says the bill would still leave about 25 million people without insurance by the year 2019, one third of them illegal immigrants.

Changes to the bill drove up the cost from the $774 billion CBO figured Baucus's original draft would have cost over a decade. Still, it's coming in at less than the Montana senator's own estimate of $856 billion over the same period.