Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price gave multiple interviews Sunday morning defending the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.
He repeatedly made false promises about what the American Health Care Act would do. He told CNN that the bill would “absolutely not” result in millions of Americans losing Medicaid. He told NBC that the goal of the Republican plan is to “make certain that every single person has health coverage.”
Nonpartisan analysis of the bill shows that neither of these claims is true. The Republican plan would result in millions of Americans losing Medicaid coverage. Passing the bill would reduce rather than increase how many people have coverage.
Price’s Sunday interviews were an echo of answers that President Trump has given to defend the Republican bill. He has described it as protecting people with preexisting conditions and reducing deductibles, while it does neither of those things.
The Trump administration offers an appealing vision of what health care could look like in the United States, a future where everyone has robust insurance coverage at a low price.
But the AHCA does not deliver on that vision. And if it passes, and its big cuts to Obamacare’s coverage expansion go into effect, Trump and Price will be forced to confront that reality.
Price claimed “absolutely nobody” would lose Medicaid coverage under AHCA. That’s not true.
Price appeared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, sitting for an interview with Jake Tapper. There, he faced a question about the fact that the Republican plan cuts more than $800 billion from Medicaid.
“Are you actually saying that $880 billion in cuts, according to CBO ... that that is not going to result in millions of Americans not getting Medicaid?” Tapper asked.
“Absolutely not,” Price responded. “We believe the Medicaid population will be cared for in a better way under our program because it will be more responsive to them.”
Price’s statement is at odds with everything we know about the AHCA. As Tapper noted, the Congressional Budget Office evaluated a previous version of the bill and estimated that it would cut $880 billion from the Medicaid program.
The CBO also estimates that the AHCA would cause 14 million people to lose their Medicaid coverage by 2026. This would mostly be a result of the AHCA ending the Medicaid expansion in 2020, a program estimated to cover 12 million low-income Americans.
Price suggests that the AHCA will offer those people a different program, and he is right. Under the AHCA, Medicaid enrollees would be eligible for a tax credit to help purchase coverage on the individual market. But those tax credits would likely only cover a small share of what a private policy costs.
For example: Consider a 40-year-old individual who earns $15,000 and lives in Philadelphia. Under current law, she receives coverage through the Pennsylvania Medicaid program.
Under the AHCA, she would receive a $3,000 annual tax credit to put toward a private insurance plans. Most plans, however, are significantly more expensive than this. In Philadelphia, for example, the average cost of a midlevel plan for a 40-year-old is $5,016. This means that the person earning $15,000 would need to spend $2,016 — or 13.4 percent of her income — on her premium.
Meanwhile, she would be purchasing a plan that offers worse coverage than Medicaid. Most midlevel plans sold on the marketplace have significant deductibles, which can be as high as $6,000. This is why the CBO doesn’t expect many Medicaid enrollees to migrate into private coverage. They’ll likely end up without insurance under the Republican plan.
Price says a problem with Obamacare is that too few people have insurance. The Republican plan would make that worse.
Elsewhere, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Price argued that one big problem with the Affordable Care Act is that too few people have coverage:
No, what we're trying to do is to make certain that every single person has health coverage. Remember, there are 20 million people right now in this country who have said to the federal government, said to the previous administration, "Nonsense, I'm not going to participate in your plan. I'll either pay a fine through the IRS or I'll get a waiver." That's 20 million individuals who don't have coverage, and we ought to say, "Why don't they have coverage?" And try to fix that.
This would be a good argument if Price were talking about a bill that would increase the number of Americans with insurance coverage.
The Republican plan, however, is not that bill. The most recent CBO estimate predicts that 24 million Americans would lose coverage under AHCA. The majority of those people losing coverage would be Medicaid enrollees, but 2 million Americans would also lose individual plans. An additional 7 million Americans would lose coverage, as the CBO expects the Republican plan would encourage some workplaces to drop their offerings.
The Republican plan does not “try to fix” the fact that 20 million Americans still lack insurance coverage. It makes that problem worse. And if the American Health Care Act does become law, that fact will become clear to the millions of Americans who lose coverage — and Price will be left to explain what happened, and why his promises didn’t come true.