States Are Beginning To Sound The Alarm On Obamacare Repeal
By LAUREN FOX Published DECEMBER 29, 2016, 6:00 AM EST
Republicans in Congress are waiting with bated breath for the moment when they pass a repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017 and President-elect Donald Trump goes to sign it, but it's their colleagues back in their home states that may have the most to lose from scrapping the law.
The repeal plans congressional Republicans have floated wouldn't likely take effect until 2019 or 2020. But already, governors and state legislatures are voicing concerns that repealing the ACA may leave millions of people uninsured, as well as take away some of the mechanisms that helped their states drastically slash their uninsured rates.
At the top of their list of concerns is the fact that the most likely blueprint in Congress for repeal, a 2015 bill that President Barack Obama vetoed, would also repeal federal funding for Medicaid expansion, which was estimated to have helped cover 11 million adults across the country in 2015. Ten Republican governors have taken advantage of the expansion, which was so successful in some places like Kentucky that, even though Gov. Matt Bevin (R) campaigned on scrapping the ACA, he simply made some tweaks to the program once he took office.
The Congressional repeal plan from 2015 would also repeal tax increases that were part of the ACA, likely shifting the burden for paying for health care from the federal government to individual states.
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