Price overstates numbers of those declining ACA

“We have got 20 million folks out there across this land who have told the federal government, ‘Phooey, nonsense, I’m not going to participate in your program, because it doesn’t do what I need done.’ ” — Tom Price on Sunday, May 7, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union”

The Affordable Care Act includes an individual mandate, which began in 2014, to push people to obtain health care coverage. It penalizes people for each month they don’t have health insurance at a minimum level of coverage. In January, the Internal Revenue Service reported that in 2016 about 12.7 million claimed one or more exemptions from the requirement to buy insurance and 6.5 million were paying a fine instead of getting insurance, a total of 19.2 million, close to Price’s 20 million. That means just over 60 percent of the 20 million who aren’t insured are claiming exemptions.

Steven Ullmann, director of the University of Miami’s Department of Health Sector Management and Policy, said millions of people struggle to find coverage because they aren’t eligible for Medicaid due to states not expanding Medicaid and some don’t qualify for the federal subsidy to purchase insurance. “They are uninsured because there is no way that they can afford the insurance,” he said. “Then there are others, generally the ‘young invincibles,’ who find that the penalty of $695 is less than the cost of the insurance policies (generally over $2,000 a year),” he said. “They’d rather go bare and take their chances.”

Our ruling

The number of people either paying a fine because they don’t have insurance or claiming an exemption is about 20 million as Price said. But Price makes it sound like all of them are simply declining coverage. Many can’t qualify for affordable coverage, even if they would like to.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

GETTY IMAGES Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price says 20 million people rejected the Affordable Care Act.