Republican lawmakers have their own version of the facts about the impact of their replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Here is an assessment.
Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania said falsely that the bill “does not pull the rug from anyone currently covered by Obamacare, and keeps the Medicaid expansion.”
A reader asked The New York Times to examine Mr. Toomey’s claims specifically as they related to Pennsylvania, where more than 700,000 people gained insurance through the Medicaid expansion and 360,000 through the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act.
While the Senate bill does not revoke expanded Medicaid eligibility, it does gradually reduce the federal government’s contributions, while also capping future funding on a per-enrollee basis. The bill’s changes to premium tax credits and its elimination of cost-sharing subsidies would affect all age groups, but especially older Americans.
This would lead to 15 million fewer Medicaid enrollees and seven million fewer in the individual market within the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office estimated.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, Pennsylvanians would see a 72 percent increase in out-of-pocket premium costs under the new bill, compared with a national average increase of 74 percent.
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