Thursday, December 08, 2016

Throwing A Wrench into the ACA

If Republicans partially repeal the Affordable Care Act early in 2017 through a reconciliation bill, then the following critical elements of the ACA would disappear: Medicaid expansion, financial assistance for Marketplace coverage, and individual and employer mandates. An Urban Institute study takes a look at the consequences of eliminating these provisions from the ACA with no alternative plan in place...
  • The number of uninsured Americans will more than double: Partial repeal would raise the number of uninsured in 2019 to 58.7 million versus 28.9 million under the ACA.
  • More than one in five Americans under age 65 will be uninsured: Partial repeal would raise the percentage of people under age 65 without health insurance to 21 percent in 2019 versus 11 percent under the ACA.
  • The majority of those losing insurance will be the white working class: 56 percent of the newly uninsured will be non-Hispanic white, 80 percent will not have a college degree, and 82 percent will be in working families. 
"This scenario does not just move the country back to the situation before the ACA," warns the Urban Institute. "It moves the country to a situation with higher uninsurance rates than before the ACA reforms."

Source: Urban Institute, Implications of Partial Repeal of the ACA through Reconciliation

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