THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Congressional Budget Office has released its report on the effects of repealing the Affordable Care Act and by their reckoning only 18 million people will lose their coverage the first year. The GOP very much had their little blackened hearts set on the higher figure of 20 million.

Repealing major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, while leaving other parts in place, would cost 18 million people their insurance in the first year, a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday. A repeal could increase the number of uninsured Americans by 32 million in 10 years, the report said, while causing individual insurance premiums to double over that time.

The budget office analyzed the probable effects of a Republican bill repealing the law like the one approved in Congress, but vetoed early last year by President Obama.

The C.B.O. report, released after a weekend of protests against repeal, will only add to the headaches that President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans face in their rush to gut President Obama’s signature domestic achievement as they try to replace it with a health insurance law more to their liking.

Republicans cautioned that the report painted only part of the picture — the impact of a fast repeal without the Republican replacement. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the finance committee, said the numbers in the report “represented a one-sided hypothetical scenario.”

“Today’s report shows only part of the equation — a repeal of Obamacare without any transitional policies or reforms to address costs and empower patients,” Mr. Hatch said. “Republicans support repealing Obamacare and implementing step-by-step reforms so that Americans have access to affordable health care.”

But that replacement bill has yet to be produced, and existing Republican plans, such as one drafted by Representative Tom Price of Georgia, now nominated to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, have yet to be scrutinized by the budget office, the official scorekeeper of legislation.

The bill that the budget office analyzed would have eliminated tax penalties for people who go without insurance. It would also have eliminated spending for the expansion of Medicaid and subsidies that help lower-income people buy private insurance. But the bill preserved requirements for insurers to provide coverage, at standard rates, to any applicant, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions.

“Eliminating the mandate penalties and the subsidies while retaining the market reforms would destabilize the nongroup market, and the effect would worsen over time,” the budget office said.

The GOP whines that the report does not include results of their replacement plan, largely because such a plan does not exist and very likely never will.