Paul Ryan: CBO report on ObamaCare repeal 'exceeded my expectations'

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Speaker Ryan: We have an encouraging score from the CBO

On 'Special Report,' the House speaker reacts to the assessment of the Republican health bill

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., embraced the Congressional Budget Office analysis of House Republicans' ObamaCare repeal bill Monday, telling "Special Report with Bret Baier" that the report "actually exceeded my expectations."

Ryan told host Bret Baier that the CBO's prediction that 14 million more Americans would be uninsured in 2018 was due to the bill's overturning of ObamaCare's individual mandate.

"Of course they’re going to say if we stop forcing people to buy something they don’t want to buy they’re not going to buy it," Ryan said. "That’s why you have these uninsured numbers, which we all expected."

According to Ryan, the key numbers in the analysis would come once the bill's reforms took effect in 2020.

"It will lower premiums 10 percent. It stabilizes the market. It’s a $1.2 trillion spending cut, and $883 billion tax cut and $337 billion in deficit reduction," Ryan said. "So, this compared to the status quo is far better."

In response to a question from a Twitter user, Ryan said that ObamaCare's repeal and replacement was a prerequisite for the House to take up tax reform, another key part of President Trump's agenda.

"[Keeping ObamaCare] actually puts us about a trillion dollars further … away from doing tax reform," the Speaker said. "We can’t get to the next budget either, which is where tax reform is done. So, it really would gum up the works and it would make tax reform that much harder to achieve because we’d have all these ObamaCare taxes to deal with as well."