By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@v
The Trump administration has insisted — as it cut Obamacare outreach funding, as it endorsed the repeal of the individual mandate, and as it opened up new avenues for people to buy health plans that don’t comply with the health law’s rules — that they weren’t actually doing any damage to the Affordable Care Act and its markets where millions of Americans buy health insurance.
We heard it again last week when the Trump administration announced that it would expand short-term insurance plans that don’t meet the ACA’s requirements. CMS Administrator Seema Verma was asked about expert arguments that premiums will go up as young and healthy people leave the ACA markets for noncompliant plans.
”We expect virtually no impact on the individual market premiums,” she told us. “We strongly feel this could help millions of Americans who are looking for an affordable option.”
That was borne out in the administration’s own estimates, which anticipated as few as 100,000 people would move from Obamacare plans to these short-term plans and projected a negligible impact on premiums.
But a new independent analysis, released Monday by the Urban Institute, serves a striking rebuttal to the administration’s rosy outlook. According to the analysis, nearly 9 million more Americans will lack minimal essential health coverage — uninsured, as far as the CBO is concerned — in 2019 and insurance premiums will increase by an average 16.4 percent across the country.
The Urban researchers looked at three scenarios to estimate the effect on insurance coverage in 2019:
The ACA before the Trump administration’s meddling
- The ACA after Republicans repealed the individual mandate and Trump officials cut enrollment outreach
- The ACA with no mandate and reduced outreach plus the expansion of short-term non-ACA plans
- Their numbers told a strikingly different story from the Trump administration: 9 million fewer people with ACA-compliant coverage — which is effectively the CBO’s standard for defining whether you are uninsured or not — once you add up the mandate’s repeal, outreach cuts, and the expansion of short-term plans.
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