Repeal of Affordable Care Act would leave 30 million without coverage, report says

WASHINGTON – Partial repeal of the Affordable Care Act through a budget reconciliation bill could cause nearly 30 million Americans to lose health insurance and 9.3 million to lose government subsidies to help them purchase marketplace coverage, according to a new analysis.

The additional 29.8 million uninsured — 22.5 million from the elimination of the Medicaid expansion alone — would push the national total of the uninsured to 58.7 million in 2019, according to the analysis by researchers at the Urban Institute.

That's more than the 50 million who lacked coverage in 2009 before the health law was passed, said John Holahan, a senior fellow at Urban Institute and co-author of the report.

More than four out of five of the newly uninsured would come from working families; 56 percent would be non-Hispanic whites.

Coverage losses would be greatest in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that expanded eligibility for Medicaid under the ACA, the report found.

In those states, the number of uninsured would rise from 14 million to 32.5 million. Non-expansion states would see an increase from 14.9 million uninsured to 26.2 million.

California would lead all expansion states with nearly 4.9 million people losing coverage while nearly 1 million would become uninsured in Pennsylvania, 775,000 in Washington state and 486,000 in Kentucky.

The new analysis predicts the coverage losses would also contribute to a "death spiral" collapse of the revamped individual insurance market and cause charity-care costs to skyrocket for hospitals and state and local governments unless new funding is provided.

The additional 29.8 million uninsured would require an extra $88 billion in uncompensated care in 2019 and an extra $1.1 trillion from 2019 to 2028, the report estimated.

The chaos would undo much of the progress the health care law has made in reducing the number of uninsured Americans. Losing federal subsidies to buy insurance would force many to simply drop their coverage.

And because healthier people would drop coverage faster, premiums would rise as insurers find a higher percentage of their customers are sick. That would leave some insurers with insufficient funds to cover claims and force others to leave the market entirely.

The research underscores the complex policy and political considerations that may make it difficult to repeal President Obama's signature legislation without first having a plan to replace it.