Obamacare repeal would raise 10-year US deficit by $353 billion

Kevin Lamarque/ReutersCathey Park of Cambridge, Massachusetts holds out her cast with "I Love Obamacare" written upon it prior to U.S. President Barack Obama's arrival to speak about health insurance at Faneuil Hall in Boston October 30, 2013. Repealing President Obama's signature healthcare law will likely come with a pricetag in the billions. 

Some conservative activists are hoping that the Supreme Court will gut Obamacare in a high-stakes opinion that will be handed down before the end of June.

But deficit-hawks within the party may be less than enthused about the price.

In their first major analysis of the issue in three years, the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation said a repeal would increase the deficit, send the number of uninsured Americans soaring, and would lead to higher Medicare costs.

According to the CBO, repealing the law could increase the U.S. budget deficit by up to $353 billion over 10 years. 

The deficit increase could be smaller. By taking into account economic feedback from an Obamacare repeal, chiefly an increase in the supply of labor as Americans lose Obamacare subsidies, CBO and JCT estimated that the deficit would only increase by $137 billion over the 2016-2025 period.

Perhaps more importantly, the CBO estimates that repealing Obamacare would increase the number of non-elderly Americans by 19 million by 2016 alone.

The CBO's estimates come as the Supreme Court is set to announce whether the federal government is legally entitled to grant subsidies to Americans who live in states that haven't set up their own health care exchanges.

Several prominent conservative legal experts brought the case after they discovered a strangely-worded phrase in the law that suggests that healthcare subsidies wouldn't be allowed in states that didn't set up their own exchanges.

If the court sides with the plaintiffs, millions of Americans in the 36 states with federally-run exchanges will no longer qualify for subsidies. This will likely force thousands of healthy subsidy-recipients to drop out, raising premiums and forcing older, less-healthy Americans off their plans. 

The repeal would hit poor, Southern communities hard. Since Obamacare was passed in 2010, 11.7 million Americans have signed up through state and federal exchanges, many of them with the help of federal government subsides.

View an interactive map below via the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows how repealing the healthcare law would play out in each state: