BAKER PANS HEALTH BILL
Gov. says Trumpcare could lose state billions
The Trump-backed bill to replace Obamacare would cost the state nearly $4 billion in federal aid by 2022, Gov. Charlie Baker said, a loss advocates say would be a hit to the state’s health and health care heavy economy and cause nearly half a million Bay State residents to either lose insurance coverage or subsidies.
Baker, in a letter dated yesterday, said his administration has analyzed the bill’s impact following the Congressional Budget Office’s own score of the so-called American Health Care Act, which Republicans have pitched as their replacement to the Affordable Care Act.
Baker, the latest Republican governor to come out against the bill, estimates that it would cost the state at least $1 billion in reduced federal aid starting in 2020, another $1.3 billion in 2021 and $1.5 billion by 2022.
“The potential loss of over $1 billion dollars in federal funding for programs that provide access to health care for our most vulnerable residents will have a significant impact on the health and economy of Massachusetts,” the Massachusetts Coalition for Coverage and Care said in a statement. The state’s economy is increasingly built on a foundation of health care and research. Health care and social assistance was the largest sector in the state’s most recent employment report.
The coalition, a group of insurance and health care companies, business groups and labor unions, including Partners Healthcare, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and Blue Cross Blue Shield, was created earlier this year to combat an ACA repeal that would “fundamentally threaten the health care system we have built in Massachusetts.”
A spokeswoman for the state Office of Health and Human Services said 300,000 people who are on MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, and another 195,000 could lose subsidies that help them pay for coverage.
Also yesterday, Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg asked the congressional delegation to fight to protect funding for the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that gave research institutions roughly $2.5 billion in grants last year. Trump has proposed cutting NIH by 19 percent in his budget proposal.
“Every dollar of medical research we use in Massachusetts generates $2.30 of economic development,” his letter said. “This economic blow would be felt by every Congressional and Senate district in the Commonwealth.”