Taxpayers will pay $50,000 for every person who obtains healthcare insurance through the Obamacare marketplace, according to a report released Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), The Daily Mail reported.
In the best case scenario, "between 24 million and 27 million" fewer Americans will be uninsured in 2025, compared to the year before the Affordable Care Act was implemented, the report said.
But to achieve that sort of coverage, the government will have to spend about $1.35 trillion, or $50,000 per person.
Overall, providing insurance subsidies to poor and middle-class Americans, and paying for an expansion of Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program, will cost $1.993 trillion over a decade.
Some $643 billion in new taxes, penalties and fees will be taken in to offset that amount, including fines paid by those who refuse to buy medical insurance and money from the medical device tax that Republicans are working to repeal, The Daily Mail said.
The CBO estimated that the "net costs of the coverage provisions of the [Affordable Care Act] will rise sharply as the effects of the act phase in from 2015 through 2017."
Costs will "continue to rise steadily from 2022 through 2025," and eventually level off at "about $145 billion" in the final years of the projection period.
Even then, the CBO estimates that "between 29 million and 31 million" Americans will still be without medical insurance.
The CBO did note that its new projected cost of Obamacare from 2015 to 2024 is $68 billion below its April 2014 projection, largely due to lower than expected enrollment in the program's exchanges.
Many federal subsidies could be in jeopardy due to a U.S. Supreme Court case expected to be ruled on by the end of June. The case seeks to prevent consumers in 36 states from receiving funds, Reuters reported.
