As many as 20 million Americans could lose the health insurance they now receive from their employers under President Obama’s new health care reforms, a report released Thursday shows.
But the report from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation said 20 million would be the worst-case scenario and that it’s possible that the number of people losing their current employer-provided insurance wouldn’t exceed 5 million between 2019 and 2022.
The agencies warned, however, that they can’t really be sure how many people will lose their current coverage if the law is rolled out as planned in a few years.
“There is clearly a tremendous amount of uncertainty about how employers and employees will respond to the set of opportunities and incentives under that legislation,” the report states.
Still, the report provides fresh ammunition to opponents of the health care reform law and could fuel growing public disapproval of the law that has been under fire from Republican presidential candidates who have vowed to repeal the reforms if they can defeat Obama in the fall election.
Congressional Republicans, fighting to overturn the entire health care law legislatively, said the report shows the president’s earlier assurances that his health care reforms would allow people to keep their current policies were false.
“He promised Americans that his overhaul of the health care sector would not jeopardize the health coverage of those who liked what they had,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Thursday. “As nonpartisan analysts made clear today, millions of Americans will soon learn the hard way that Washington’s overreach into their health care decisions will result in sharp disruptions to their coverage and their care.”
The health care reform law calls for the creation of government-run health insurance exchanges and would provide subsidies to help the poorest pay for health insurance.
Many states, though, are either refusing to create the exchanges or are waiting to see whether the U.S. Supreme Court declares the law unconstitutional, leading some experts to predict there will be no affordable alternative ready once the law is fully implemented.
The two agencies that produced the new report, meanwhile, said the number of employees who lose their employer-provided insurance could be held to 5 million or fewer because employers who provide insurance are rewarded with lower payroll taxes.
Critics of this theory, however, note that the cost of providing insurance to an employee would be about $12,000 a year while the penalty for not providing coverage under the new health care law is just $3,000 per worker.
The report said the firms most likely to shift their workers to the insurance exchanges are those who employ lower-wage workers who would be eligible for subsidies on the exchanges.
“Anyone who earns less than $60,000 or $70,000 per year is going to lose their employer-based benefits,” predicts John Graham, director of health care studies for the Pacific Research Institute.
Michael Tanner, senior fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute, noted that rising health care costs have already prompted employers to reduce their health care plans or shift more of the cost to employees and that trend is likely to continue. The new law, he said, “will probably cause some acceleration of that as businesses see a viable alternative.”
