Repealing ACA Would Be "Devastating" for Florida: Urban Institute Report
Posted December 14, 2016 07:30 am | Public News Service
TALLAHASSEE,
FL – Congress is considering repealing parts of the
Affordable Care Act, and a new report suggests Florida
would be one of the states most dramatically impacted by
that plan. The Urban Institute research shows that in
Florida, more than two million children and adults would
lose coverage, nearly doubling the number of uninsured
in the state.
Miriam Harmatz is the senior health law attorney with
Florida Legal Services, and she said repealing the ACA
without a plan to replace it would hit those Floridians
who need health coverage the most.
"They're
working, but they couldn't pay for their diabetes
medicine, or their high blood pressure medicine, or
their set of dentures," she said. "They couldn't do
basic health care that kept them from their full
productivity."
The partial repeal would come through the budget
reconciliation process and include the elimination of
the premium tax credits, Medicaid expansion and the
individual mandate. Senate Republicans have said rolling
back the law would have few impacts on the number of
people without health insurance. But the report shows
that nearly 30 million Americans would lose coverage.
Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown
University Center for Children and Families, said there
is a lot of misinformation about who would be most
impacted by a repeal of the ACA. She explained it's not
just those who are low-income.
"Eighty-two percent of those losing coverage would be in
working families," she added. "The majority of those are
non-Hispanic whites and 80 percent of the adults
becoming uninsured would not have college degrees."
Alker also added repeal would cause chaos in state
budgets as well.
"Families' health-care needs won't disappear if their
coverage goes away," she warned. "And the responsibility
for responding to that will fall squarely into the
states' lap and we'll have huge gaps in our health-care
safety net."
The report showed that over the next 10 years, Florida
would lose $87 billion in federal health-care funding,
more than any other state.
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