Greg Sargent
takes a stab—a well-informed and considered stab—at determining what's at stake economically for the states that might lose out in
King v. Burwell, if the Supreme Court decides to take subsidies away from the states using the federal insurance exchange. The numbers are pretty staggering.
We’re talking about enormous amounts of money: Florida could lose nearly half a billion dollars per month in subsidies to its constituents. Texas could lose a quarter of a billion dollars per month. North Carolina and Georgia could each lose over one hundred million per month.
Here are the 14 states with the most at stake:
The column on the left details the approximate total number of people in each state who qualify for subsidies. The middle column details the average amount in subsidies per person. And the column on the right details the approximate total number of dollars per month that are set to flow into each state—money that would presumably stop flowing if SCOTUS guts the subsidies.
Just to emphasize: that's
per month. Sargent used methodology suggested by the Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt who knows both the law and the data, using the information released by the Department of Health and Human Services on enrollment by state, percentage of people getting subsidies, and the average amount of the subsidies. It's a rough estimate, but probably pretty close.
"This a very reasonable approach to estimating the amount of federal subsidies people living in these states will receive," Levitt says. "Billions of dollars are flowing to low and middle income people under the law, and most of those are going to people in states using HealthCare.gov. This makes it very tangible: If the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs, states would be losing in some cases hundreds of millions in federal money per month."
Remember that these are also states that, in large part, refused Medicaid expansion and as a result of that have taken an economic hit. They're seeing
hospitals and emergency rooms being closed because of lost resources for caring for the uninsured. Losing these subsidies would only compound that disaster.