As you may know, I’ve spent the past month crunching the numbers to break out just how many people are at risk of losing their healthcare coverage in all 50 states, all 435 Congressional Districts and all 3,200+ Counties nationwide if the ACA really is repealed.
As a reminder, for the ACA exchange enrollment numbers, I’ve taken the total number of people who signed up during open enrollment (around 12.25 million), then knocked that down by roughly 1/3 to account for:
- ~10% who never pay their first premium anyway
- ~15% who aren’t receiving any financial assistance (this applies to 2017 only; 2018 is a whole different issue)
- ~8% who are only receiving nominal financial assistance (i.e., it’d be annoying but not devastating to lose that assistance)
...knocking the tally down to around 8.2 million exchange-based enrollees nationally, which is likely the “high water mark” for those truly at risk of being thrown under the bus (this year).
Medicaid expansion, on the other hand, can be enrolled in year-round by those who qualify. That means that people have been continuing to quietly sign up for Medicaid for the past month.
Result?
Yes, that’s right: the Medicaid Expansion enrollment tally has increased by another 35,000 people across just 3 states over the past month.
Unfortunately, most states don’t put out regular reports on these numbers (it was a royal pain to get the existing numbers for many of them), so I don’t know how much they’ve bumped up nationally, but MI/PA/LA combined make up around 12% of the total expansion population, so it’s conceivable that the national total has gone up as much as 300,000 people, to as many as 15.2 million.
Something to keep in mind when you’re checking out jck’s excellent diary which took my congressional district estimates, slapped them side-by-side with Trump’s margin of victory in various GOP districts and concluded that up to 51 of them could conceivably be flippable if coverage loss proves to be a potent 2018 campaign issue.
It takes an awful lot of time and effort to maintain the ACA Signups website. If anyone’s in a position to help support the ACA Signups project, it would be tremendously appreciated.