About 52 million Americans had health conditions last year that could be considered pre-existing conditions if Obamacare were repealed, according to a new analysis.
While a majority of those Americans would be covered via their job, the analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation is meant to show the impact of losing the law’s ban on insurers blocking coverage to people with pre-existing health conditions. Kaiser did not have an exact estimate on how many of the 52 million people would be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition on the individual market, which is for people that don’t get coverage through their jobs.
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The analysis released Tuesday from the foundation comes as President-elect Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress set their sights on repealing Obamacare next month. However, both Trump and Republicans vow to keep Obamacare’s ban on insurers blocking coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
Before Obamacare went online in 2014, insurers under the individual market sold plans that were medically underwritten. That means they could evaluate the health and history of a person and determine what type of coverage to give them, if any at all.
The individual market is for people who don’t get their coverage through their job, and Obamacare’s marketplaces are for people in the individual market. Obamacare stopped the practice.
Kaiser looked at government data and found that last year 27 percent of adult Americans under 65, about 52 million people, would likely be uninsurable if they tried to get individual market coverage without Obamacare’s pre-existing condition ban.
“While a large share of this group has coverage through an employer or public coverage where they do not face medical underwriting, these estimates quantify how many people could be eligible for individual market insurance under pre-[Affordable Care Act] practices if they were ever to lose coverage,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser also broke down which states could be impacted the most by losing the pre-existing conditions ban.
In Colorado and Minnesota at least 22 percent of adults have conditions that would not likely get covered. Rates are higher in the South in states such as West Virginia (36 percent), Arkansas (32) and Tennessee (32), Kaiser said.
Kaiser also noted that before Obamacare went online in 2014, it estimated that 18 percent of individual market applications were denied.
Medical conditions that were likely declined included Crohn’s disease, alcohol or drug abuse, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, epilepsy and a stroke.
