Rumors abound about the latest Trumpcare push by Senate Republicans. There's more indication that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is going to help all he can to ram this through, including only getting a partial score from the Congressional Budget Office, one that just talks about the money and not the loss of coverage it would cause. In case you're wondering, it's probably around 32 million by 2026.
Not that the bill's author, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) cares. In fact, he says he doesn't. "I just don't care about the coverage numbers" from the CBO he says. That's because those numbers are going to be very, very bad. That's because this bill is really, really bad. So bad, that its effects would be worse ten years out that straight across, simple Obamacare repeal according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which has extensive analyses of the bill, since the CBO hasn't gotten there yet.
Legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) sponsored by Senators Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham would significantly cut federal funding for health coverage over the next decade, and the cuts would grow dramatically in 2027, when the bill’s temporary block grant (which would replace the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and marketplace subsidies) would expire and its Medicaid per capita cap cuts would become increasingly severe. We estimate that in 2027 alone, the bill would cut federal health care funding by $299 billion relative to current law, with the cuts affecting all states.
In fact, starting in 2027, Cassidy-Graham would likely be even more damaging than a straight repeal-without-replace bill because it would add large cuts to the rest of Medicaid—on top of eliminating the Medicaid expansion—by imposing a per capita cap on the entire program. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has previously estimated that the repeal-without-replace approach would ultimately leave 32 million more people uninsured. Cassidy-Graham would presumably result in even deeper coverage losses than that in the second decade as the cuts due to the Medicaid per capita cap continue to deepen.
JAM THE PHONE LINES. Call your senator at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to just stop playing with our lives. (After you call, please tell us how it went.)
How it gets there is really, really nasty. In the first years, it's a massive transfer of money from the blue state that took Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act to states that didn't. In 2021 it "redistribute(s) the reduced federal funding across states, based on their share of low-income residents rather than their actual spending needs" and would, over time, "punish states that have adopted the Medicaid expansion or been more successful at enrolling low- and moderate-income people in marketplace coverage under the ACA."
But by 2026, all states would lose. For example, in 2026, Alaska would lose $255 million; Arizona, $1.6 billion; Louisiana, $3.2 billion; Maine, $115 million; Nevada, $639 million; Ohio, $2.5 billion; and West Virginia, $554 million, just to name a few. You can see the total losses for state in the chart below. Then you can use that information to call your Republican senators and representative.