About 6.4M risk losing health-care subsidies

Supreme Court decision on Obamacare due this month

Washington Post

Approximately 6.4 million Americans could lose their subsidies for health insurance if the Supreme Court rules against the Obama administration this month, according to new federal data.

Enrollment data for the health-care law shows that 10.2 million people had signed up and paid their premiums as of March 2015, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Of those, 6.4 million are receiving subsidies to help them pay for private insurance in the 34 states that are relying on the federal health insurance marketplace, HealthCare.gov.

If the court sides with the challengers, those consumers would lose their subsidies, or about $1.7 billion a month, according to the data.

Although health researchers made similar projections earlier this year, the government figures released last week provide the best available estimate of how many people would be at risk, said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“These are the people we now know are receiving subsidies that would be lost if the court sides with the challengers,” he said. “The amounts are substantial.”

The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell argue that people who buy coverage on the federal exchange are not entitled to subsidies. (Consumers in the 16 states and the District of Columbia that set up their own insurance exchanges would not be affected.)

The Obama administration argues that Congress intended to help everyone who qualifies for it. The court is expected to issue its ruling by the end of the month.

The subsidies are scaled to income. The average subsidy is $272 per month.

Many who receive subsidies through the federal marketplace are white and live in the South, according to a recent Urban Institute analysis. Half have full-time jobs. Many live in states such as Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas — states led by Republican officials who oppose the health-care law and have balked at setting up their own exchanges. Another big group lives in the Midwest, in states such as Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Florida would be most affected in terms of the number of people losing subsidies (1.3 million) and the total monthly value of those subsidies ($389 million), with Texas ranked second in both categories (832,000 residents losing a total of $206 million per month), according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the new federal data.

The states with the highest proportion of consumers receiving subsidies are: Mississippi (94.5 percent), Florida (93.5), North Carolina (93.2), Wyoming (92.9) Louisiana