#individual mandate

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Millions at risk of losing health insurance after Trump's victory

Subsidies to buy insurance from the Affordable Care Act marketplaces are set to expire at the end of 2025. If they're not extended, coverage

Berkeley Lovelace Jr. at NBC News:

Millions of Americans risk losing subsidies next year that help them pay for health insurance following President-elect Donald Trump’s election win and Republicans’ victory in the Senate. The subsidies — which expire at the end of 2025 — came out of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, and increased the amount of assistance available to people who want to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. The American Rescue Plan also broadened the number of people eligible for subsidies, extending them to many in the middle class.  

The looming expiration date means that the incoming Congress and next president will need to decide whether to extend them — something Trump and Republicans have already signaled they don’t support, said Chris Meekins, a health policy research analyst at the investment firm Raymond James. “If Republicans end up winning the House, in addition to the Senate and White House, having a GOP sweep, I think the odds are less than 5% they get extended,” said Meekins, who was a senior HHS official in Trump’s first term. Even Democratic control of the House likely won’t save the subsidies, he added.  Several important House races have still yet to be decided. As of Thursday afternoon, House Republicans had won 209 seats, just nine short of the majority, according to an NBC News tracker.  In 2024, more than 20 million people got health insurance through the ACA, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

Since the 2021 subsidies went into effect, enrollment in ACA plans with reduced payments doubled, particularly in Southern red states, said Cynthia Cox, the director of the program on the ACA at KFF, a nonpartisan health care policy research group.  The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, extended the subsidies through 2025. In 32 states where data is available, 15.5 million people receive the subsidies, according to KFF. If the subsidies aren’t extended, the Congressional Budget Office — a nonpartisan agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress — estimates that nearly 4 million people will lose their coverage in 2026 because they won’t be able to afford it.  Enrollment will continue to fall each year, with coverage reaching as low as 15.4 million people in 2030.  

[...] Cox said she expects Republicans to keep dismantling the ACA, similar to Trump’s first term, when they eliminated the tax penalty linked to the law’s individual mandate, which required people to have health insurance or pay a tax. The mandate is technically still in place, but the penalty was reduced to zero. “If Republicans control the House, the Senate and the presidency, then we might see a repeat of 2017,” she said.  Gostin said eliminating the ACA entirely will be a challenge, even if Republicans control all three chambers.

Millions of Americans could face health insurance coverage loss next year, as subsidies for Obamacare are set to expire.

See Also:

The Guardian: Incoming Trump presidency threatens millions of Americans’ healthcare plans

[thepoliticalpatient]

Can we dispell with the notion that there are people who don't want health insurance?

One of the big arguments against the individual mandate (the now-overturned clause of the Affordable Care Act that required everybody to purchase insurance) is that we shouldn't force people who don't want health insurance to buy it.

Who doesn't want health insurance? That is, if you polled the general public and asked them, "In the event of an illness or injury, would you like to pay your medical bills out of pocket, or would you like to have them covered?" is there any human who is going to say that they'd prefer to pay their own way?

Are there people who need to spend their money on more immediately pressing concerns than a safety net that protects them in the event of an illness or injury that hasn't happened yet? Of course. But to characterize a young, healthy, poor person as someone who "doesn't want health insurance" is disingenuous. If that health insurance were made available to them for free or very cheap - as it would be in a single-payer system funded by a graduated tax - they would not turn it down. The issue is that the price tag is currently too high.

And removing the individual mandate has only accomplished making it even higher.

[usatodayopinion]

[ncpssm]

CBO: 7 million more uninsured after ObamaCare mandate repeal

The repeal of ObamaCare’s individual mandate will result in 7 million more people without health insurance by 2021, according to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

That number is far lower than the agency’s 2017 estimate that 13 million people would be uninsured by 2027, which came as Congress was debating the GOP tax bill.

via The Hill.

Related Reading:

How the Affordable Care Act Helps Seniors.

The ACA provides new ways to help hospitals, doctors and other health care providers coordinate care for beneficiaries so that health care quality is improved and unnecessary spending reduced.

Improvements made in the ACA to Medicare preventive services and prescription drug coverage have lowered the out-of-pocket costs of millions of seniors.

[gettothedancing]

9 Years After Obamacare Passed, Agency Finds Numbers Were Wildly Off

As Klein noted, the Congressional Budget Office estimates were a large part of why the individual mandate was adopted in the first place, and a big reason why its repeal didn’t pass. So it’s a wonder why the media isn’t picking this up.

Initial estimates from the Congressional Budget Office said 14 million would drop off their health insurance coverage due to the elimination of the individual mandate. Then, during the height of the 2017 debate over repeal, progressives touted a leaked number from the Congressional Budget Office claiming that 22 million people would “lose” their insurance if Congress repealed the law.

However, as health care analyst Avik Roy pointed out, what made this number so high was the inflated number of people expected to lose their insurance due to repeal of the mandate—about 73 percent to be exact. So, it wouldn’t be 22 million Americans losing their insurance. Most of those in the projection would simply be choosing to opt out of insurance.

And it turns out even that wasn’t true. A far smaller number of Americans appear to be opting out of insurance since the individual mandate’s repeal. Only 2.5 million more people are expected to go without insurance in 2019 due to its repeal, according to the latest report, and that number is expected to decline in the years ahead.

[autisticadvocacy]

Senate Tax Bill Would Add 13 Million to Uninsured to Pay for Tax Cuts of Nearly $100,000 Per Year for the Top 0.1 Percent

Eliminating the individual mandate would increase the number of Americans without health insurance by millions.

Cutting the individual mandate would leave 13 million uninsured.

[marvelsupergirls]

This woman is a sellout to her gender, to her people. She is willing to throw 13 million people off of their health insurance all for an oil patch! Re-blog if you care!

[libamericaorg]

They're Still At It--The GOP Tax Plan Takes Aim At Obamacare (Video)

They’re Still At It–The GOP Tax Plan Takes Aim At Obamacare (Video)

They’re at it again.

As if the proposed Senate Republican tax plan did not put enough targets on average Americans’ backs, according to multiple reports, the revised bill includes another insult: repeal the Affordable Care Act’s, aka Obamacare, individual mandate.

The individual mandate is the most controversial part of former President Barack Obama’s signature legislation.

It requiresall…

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