You can read the CBO analysis of the Reconciliation Act of 2010 (the reconciliation sidecar for the health care bill) at this link. More in a minute.

…here is how the leadership got savings in the second 10 years. This is very important:

Relative to H.R. 3590, the reconciliation proposal would make a number of changes that would affect its longer-term impact on the budget. In particular, it would increase the subsidies offered in the new insurance exchanges and would reduce the impact of an excise tax on health insurance plans with premiums above certain thresholds. An important component of the longer-term analysis is that, beginning in 2019, the reconciliation proposal would change the annual indexing provisions so that the premium subsidies offered through the exchanges would grow more slowly; over time, the spending on exchange subsidies would therefore fall back toward the level under H.R. 3590 by itself. Another key component of the longer-term analysis is that, beginning in 2020, the reconciliation proposal would index the thresholds for the high-premium excise tax to the rate of general inflation rather than to inflation plus one percentage point.

We already knew about changing the excise tax indexing to the CPI rather than the CPI plus one percent. But the bolded section is key. You’re going to hear a lot about how the bill was improved by reconciliation, and in particular the subsidies – the amount spent to provide affordable coverage for lower-income Americans. In this leaked document you can see how those subsidy changes are highlighted: those receiving subsidies would pay a slightly lower percentage of their income for health insurance, and cost sharing would be slightly higher.

But the bolded section tells us that these improvements will be RATCHETED BACK in the second ten years, to conform to the deficit reduction needs of reconciliation. Therefore, by the end of 2029, the subsidy numbers will essentially be the same as in the Senate bill.

UPDATE: There will be a press conference from the House leadership at noon.

UPDATE II: Since Jon Cohn very nicely called my whip counts “the best accounting you’ll find on the web,” I’ll link to his rundown of what’s in the reconciliation package. Most of it is familiar: Closing the prescription drug donut hole for seniors, applying the delay in the excise tax to all workers, extending the Medicaid expansion assistance to all states, applying consumer protection standards to private plans rather than keeping a “grandfathering” clause that would have exempted them.

The rate review board, as mentioned yesterday, has been tanked.