Medicaid Cuts Could Add Millions to U.S. Uninsured

According to estimations by the Congressional Budget Office, the number of uninsured Americans could rise by 13.7 million over the course of the next ten years due to healthcare legislation currently proposed or left to expire. Proposed cuts to Medicaid as part of the budget bill, updated Sunday, would be responsible for the loss of 7.7 million insurance holders, while separate legislation on the ACA insurance marketplace will cause 0.9 million more uninsured Americans. Finally, the expiration of the 2021 expanded premium tax credits is expected to make 4.2 million more people uninsured.

A calculation by Statista, which assumed that the number of uninsured Americans will additionally rise in line with population growth until 2034, shows that in ten years, 42.3 million U.S. residents could once again be without health insurance. While this is still lower that the pre-ACA high of 46.3 million in 2009, it would signal a reversal of the trend of fewer Americans being uninsured recently. The 2034 number represents 11.7 percent of Americans, while in 2009, 15.4 percent in the country had no health insurance coverage.