Tens of millions of Americans would lose health insurance under the most minimal health care bill Senate Republicans are reportedly considering.
Vox’s Alvin Chang created the following chart to illustrate what percentage of Americans would become uninsured under each of the bills Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has proposed. The light blue line shows what percentage of Americans would remain uninsured if Obamacare is left entirely intact.
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The first two bills — the Better Care Reconciliation Act and the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act — have both failed this week in votes on the Senate floor. BCRA would have repealed Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and scaled back its private subsidies, while ORRA virtually repealed Obamacare entirely and gave Republicans two years to come up with an alternative.
The last-ditch “skinny repeal” plan — which Vox’s Sarah Kliff argues isn’t skinny at all — would roll back the individual mandate, curb some of the Affordable Care Act’s taxes, and cut Planned Parenthood funding. However, several parts of skinny repeal appear unlikely to pass the rules of reconciliation, which Republicans are using to pass their health bill with only 50 votes.
Moreover, nobody knows exactly what will be in the skinny repeal because Senate Republicans have not produced the text of the bill. Since the kinds of policies that might be included in such a bill have been reported in the press — and have been previously evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office — Senate Democrats asked the CBO to package together previous reports on the expected policies, which is the number reflected above.
Of course, as the White House likes to point out, even under Obamacare a full 10 percent of Americans — an estimated 28 million — remain uninsured. If more states expanded Medicaid under current law, that number would drop. There are also some more dramatic ways to drive that number to zero.
