May 26, 2017
As we know, the goal of the Trump administration is to redistribute as much income as quickly as possible to his family, friends, and people like his family and friends. This is why the centerpiece of his health care reform is more than $600 billion in tax cuts over the next decade that will go overwhelmingly to the richest one percent of the population.
But there is a flip side to these cuts. If the government is spending less money on health care, then the corporations and wealthy individuals who get their income from the health care sector will be seeing less money. Fortunately, the American Health Care Act of 2017 is designed to minimize this problem.
While it will reduce the percentage of insured among the under 65 population by 9.1 percentage points, according to the analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will only reduce the percentage of the under 65 who are privately insured by 5.9 percent.[1]
Source: CBO 2017 and CBO 2012.
This means that if we assume the reduction in payments to private insurers are proportionate to the reduction in enrollment, insurers will see a loss of roughly $24 billion in net revenue (premiums minus payments to providers) in 2026 even though total government spending on the AHCA and Medicaid will be down by $156 billion in that year. This means that, even though insurance companies will get somewhat less money as a result of the AHCA, the Republicans have shielded them from the worst effects of the spending reduction.
[1] These numbers are taken from Table 4, the total insured population is derived from CBO (2012), Table 3, with the assumption that the percentages of publicly and privately insured would stay the same from the last year in that analysis (2022) until 2026.
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