By John Haughey
The Center Square
June 26, 2020
(The Center Square) – More than 23 million Americans, including 1.75 million Floridians, would lose their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is repealed, a Center for American Progress (CAP) analysis found.
Among those losing coverage would be nearly 200,000 Floridians who have signed onto Obamacare after losing their jobs and employer-provided insurance during the COVID-19 emergency, CAP said.
President Donald Trump’s administration and 18 state attorneys general, including Florida’s Ashley Moody, filed briefs Thursday in California v. Texas before the Supreme Court, seeking to repeal the 2010 ACA.
Among ACA provisions on the block are protections for pre-existing conditions, individual health insurance plan subsidies, expanded Medicaid eligibility, coverage of young adults under parents’ insurance policies and coverage of preventive care.
When Congress adopted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in December 2017, it eliminated the ACA penalty for those who declined to buy health insurance coverage.
Twenty states, including Florida, filed a federal lawsuit in February 2018 in Texas, where U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor found ACA was unconstitutional because TCJA eliminated the mandatory contribution. He ruled the entire law should be struck down.
After Democratic victories in November 2018’s mid-term elections, Wisconsin and Maine withdrew from the case, leaving 18 states and the U.S. Justice Department to challenge ACA.
A suit by 17 states, including California, sought to preserve the law. The two cases have been combined into California v. Texas.
In December, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld O’Connor’s ruling but sent the case back to him to determine what ACA components can be retained.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, accepted the case earlier this year. Briefs were filed this week, oral arguments are scheduled for October and a ruling should be issued before June 2021.
In filing the government’s brief Thursday, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said the unconstitutional individual mandate cannot be separated from other ACA provisions. Therefore, he argued, “it necessarily follows the rest of the ACA must also fall.”
Because it’s one of 14 states that didn’t expand Medicaid under ACA, repealing the entire law would have a less dramatic enrollment effect in Florida than elsewhere.
Florida, however, leads the nation in enrollment in the subsidized health-insurance exchange offered under ACA through its $30 billion Medicaid program’s 17 managed care plans that provide services for nearly 4.2 million low-income residents.
More than 1 million state residents signed up in December for subsidized coverage in 2020, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Nearly 800,000 existing enrollees were automatically renewed, meaning 1.78 million Floridians were participating in ACA’s subsidized health care exchange in January, accounting for more than 20 percent of the nation’s 8.4 million Obamacare beneficiaries.
With 190,000 signing on since March, adding to the 1.56 million who stood to lose coverage under the suit before the COVID-19 emergency, the projected number of Floridians left without coverage now would be 1.75 million, CAP said.
According to a 2019 Urban Institute study, ACA repeal could leave 3.9 million nonelderly Floridians without health insurance, a 1.56 million increase in the state’s “uninsured nonelderly adult” population from about 14.4 to nearly 25 percent, increasing uncompensated care costs by about $4 billion within a year.
The Urban Institute said ACA repeal would cause Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) enrollment to fall by 22.4 percent and enrollment in the ACA individual market coverage by 35.4 percent.
About 3.1 million nonelderly Floridians will lose coverage for pre-existing conditions, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a liberal non-profit organization founded by John Podesta and the current chairman is Tom Daschle. Both not noted for their objectivity. After passage of the ACA, many hardworking citizens lost their health care because the ACA made it almost impossible, for their employers, to provide health care as part of an employee package. With the repeal of ACA, some citizens will benefit and others will not, but both sides of the issue need to be analyzed without politics.