Insurance Losses Under ‘Skinny Repeal’
As Perry mentioned yesterday, the Democrats asked the Congressional Budget Office to score a health bill that includes repeal of the individual and employer mandates, two key pieces of the “skinny repeal” that seems most likely to emerge from the Senate GOP’s deliberations. You might think that the significant majority of insurance losses under such a plan would come from employer-based coverage and individually purchased coverage (such as on the exchanges).
But if I’m reading the report right, one of the striking findings is that by the end of the next decade, nearly half the insurance losses would come via Medicaid. That’s related to the “woodwork effect,” which is the fact that a significant share of the increases in the insured population under the ACA came from people who were already eligible for Medicaid before 2014. So while policymakers might think about the various provisions of the ACA as separate, they work in concert.