Over a Million Texans May Lose Insurance Under Senate Plan

By now, we all know that Monday’s CBO report estimated that the Senate health care bill ("BCRA") will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 22 million.

And now we’re starting to see some estimates of what that would look like in Texas.

A report released Tuesday by the Urban Institute has some grim estimates regarding the impact of the bill in Texas.

It estimates that by 2022 over a million Texans will lose coverage under the Senate bill, including 440,000 Texans with employer-sponsored insurance and 768,000 Texans with individual market insurance.

The data is available on page 13 of the report. (The report also includes Medicaid estimates, although they are based on the unlikely assumption that all state legislatures will fully replace the lost federal Medicaid funding.)

One of the reasons for the loss of private insurance is that higher premiums and deductibles, combined with skimpier coverage, would discourage people from buying insurance under the Senate plan. For example, the CBO report shows that a 64-year-old earning $26,500 per year pays a $1,700 annual premium for a “silver plan” now. Under the Senate plan, his premium would skyrocket to $6,500, and the “actuarial value” of the plan would drop due to higher deductibles and copays.

That and other examples of higher premiums under the Senate plan are available in Table 5 in the CBO report appendix.

Additional data published for the Urban Institute report addresses the number of children in each state who would lose coverage under the Senate plan.

It estimates that 295,000 Texas children will lose coverage under the Senate plan by 2022.

The data is available in Table 1.B.

Another Urban Institute report, published earlier this month with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, estimates the impact of the House health care bill’s cuts to the traditional Medicaid program.

That report estimates the House plan would eliminate Medicaid coverage for 224,000 Texans by 2022.

The data is available on page 23 of the report.

The bottom line is that this legislation would be a disaster for Texas and the country. We need to keep up the pressure on the Senate to toss this bill in the garbage and start over.