As I noted at the time, Vought's proposed budget would include, among many other horrific things, completely eliminating funding for the ACA's Medicaid expansion program as well as complete elimination of all Advance Premium Tax Credit (APTC) funding for ACA exchange-based individual market enrollees.
I went on to note that if this proposal were to somehow pass the Senate and be signed into law by President Biden (neither of which is likely to happen, to put it mildly), nearly 40 million Americans would lose healthcare coverage as a result nationally.
Below, I've broken that number out by state to give better context about just how draconian such an eventuality would be.
As I noted a few weeks back, the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act now directly provides healthcare coverage for a stunning 40 million Americans:
...it's very likely that another 50,000 - 100,000 people will be added to the final QHP tally when the dust settles tomorrow (Tuesday, January 31st) evening. Even assuming the same 94% effectuation rate, that will still bring the effectuated QHP total to roughly 15.4 million.
Add to this the 1,217,517 confirmed Basic Health Plan (BHP) enrollees in New York and Minnesota and the subtotal comes to around 16.62 million QHPs + BHPs combined.
Next, we need to add Medicaid Expansion enrollees.
...the MBES reports only run through March 2022, at which point the national ACA expansion total stood at 22,275,433.
We're up to 38.9 million Americans with ACA coverage already, and we're still missing a lot of Medicaid expansion enrollees.
The end of the maintenance of effort requirement will be the most significant event for exchange stakeholders in 2023, according to various sources who work closely with health insurance exchanges across the country.
...Estimates of how many people could lose Medicaid benefits and have access to other coverage range from about 15 million to 18 million, and of those about 2.5 million could be eligible for exchange coverage according to recent analyses by HHS and the Urban Institute.
The press release talks about "more than 35 million" being enrolled, but when you look at the actual data, it's almost certainly over 36 million as of today. Here's how they break it out:
Effectuated ACA exchange enrollment as of March 2022: 13,640,412
Medicaid Expansion (newly eligible) as of October 2021: 16,781,800
Medicaid Expansion (previously eligible) as of October 2021: 4,261,277
Basic Health Plan enrollment as of March 2022: 1,135,190
TOTAL: 35,818,679
Notice that even without delving further, the total is already over 35.8 million.
However, there's two important dates to look at here: First, the Medicaid Expansion totals are only up to date as of last October, a good 6 months ago.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to hold the most powerful position in Congress, who has been the leader of House Democrats for 20 years, announced earlier today that she's stepping down from her leadership position as soon as the 118th Congress takes office on January 3rd, 2023.
Pelosi is a legend in the U.S. Congress, and no accomplishment more perfectly illustrates her skill than the passage of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act in 2009 - 2010.
There's one night I will remember most when thinking about Nancy Pelosi - the night I watched her single handedly save health care for 20 million Americans. It was at the first Democratic caucus meeting after Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts.
Many rank-and-file Democrats were in a panic, and they lined up at the microphone to tell Pelosi that it was time for us to give up on the Affordable Care Act. Or chop it up into little pieces - as some in the White House were suggesting.
New Reports Show Record 35 Million People Enrolled in Coverage Related to the Affordable Care Act, with Historic 21 Million People Enrolled in Medicaid Expansion Coverage
Last June, the U.S. Health & Human Services Dept. confirmed my estimate that total enrollment in healthcare policies either specifically created by (or expanded to more people by) the Affordable Care Act had broken 31 million Americans:
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a new report that shows 31 million Americans have health coverage through the Affordable Care Act – a record. The report also shows that there have been reductions in uninsurance rates in every state in the country since the law’s coverage expansions took effect. People served by the health Marketplaces and Medicaid expansion have reached record highs.
This week, HHS’s office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) is also releasing a report analyzing new survey data that showed the uninsured rate fell in 2021 after the American Rescue Plan and outreach efforts took effect. According to the report, the uninsured rate for U.S. population was 8.9% for the third quarter of 2021 (July – September 2021), down from 10.3% for the last quarter of 2020 – corresponding to roughly 4.6 million more people with coverage over that time period. Coverage gains occurred among both children and working age adults, with the largest coverage gains for those with incomes under 200% of the poverty level (roughly $27,000 for a single adult or $56,000 for a family of four).
Bottom Line: The case was basically thrown out for lack of standing, in a 7-2 decision, with Justice Breyer delivering the opinion of the court, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan (of course), but also Justices Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Thomas!
Justice Alito and Gorsuch dissented.
From the opinion itself:
Held: Plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge §5000A(a)’s minimum essential coverage provision because they have not shown a past or future injury fairly traceable to defendants’ conduct enforcing the specific statutory provision they attack as unconstitutional. Pp. 4–16.
