Texas stands to lose $205,586,498 in tax credits to its citizens with Obamacare policies, if the Supreme Court rules that the law doesn't authorize those subsidies, because Texas uses the federal insurance exchange. That's 832,334 people, by the way, at risk at losing their subsidies in Texas. In Florida, it's $389,407,704 going to a whopping 1,324,516 people. Those two states represent nearly a third of the nation's population that's at risk of losing subsidies, according to
new state-by-state analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Kaiser predicts a lower total number of people at risk in the nation—6,387,789—than an estimate from the Urban Institute that puts the total at over 8 million. The Urban Institute says that the total loss would be "$28.8 billion in tax credits and cost-sharing reductions in 2016 ($340 billion over 10 years) for 9.3 million people." Kaiser says that the amount lost in one year would be $1,737,476,989, and that premiums would increase by an average of 287 percent. If you live in Mississippi, your premiums would increase by 650 percent—the highest increase—and if you're in Arizona, you're in luck because your increase will only be 132 percent.
But when all this hits—if it hits because the court might very well rule for the government—will all those millions of people know what happened? Another survey from Kaiser suggests not.
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Health Policy News Index, which tracks how closely the public follows health stories in the news, found that 59% of Americans have not been paying much or any attention to news stories about the case, and only 16% have been following very closely. That means that when the verdict comes the media's first job will be to explain what the case was about.
If we're counting on the traditional media to handle all that, I think we're out of luck. If we're counting on the traditional media to explain how the case came about and who's really to blame—well, they'll be a lot more interested in that story, but don't count on them to get that one right, either. So we'll have at least 6.4 million people in 34 states who will all of the sudden be in jeopardy of losing their health insurance and more than half of them will have no idea why. But they'll be mad as hell.
