Repealing Health Reform Would Cost Half a Million Marylanders their Coverage

If Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act without a replacement health care program, 476,000 Marylanders will lose their health care coverage by 2019, according to analysis by the Urban Institute. This would more than double the number of residents of our state without health insurance and would put millions more at risk. Marylanders cannot afford this threat to our health and finances.

Health care reform significantly reduced the share of Maryland residents without health insurance. In 2013, before the law’s major provisions took effect, 10.2 percent of Marylanders were uninsured, according to data from the American Community Survey. By 2015, that number was down by more than a third, to 6.6 percent. For the first time, many workers struggling to make ends meet at low-wage jobs have access to Medicaid, young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance, and people living with chronic illnesses are no longer locked out of the individual insurance market. What’s more, millions of Maryland workers no longer have to worry that if they lose their job, their insurance will go with it.

If Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act, all these gains will disappear.

As Marylanders lose access to health insurance, more will be left with the emergency room as their only source of care. When uninsured patients can’t pay for these visits on their own, state and local governments are left with the bill. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, state and local governments across the country will have to cover more than $1 trillion in increased costs over the next decade from uninsured patients who can’t pay for their care on their own.

Making matters worse, if Congress repeals health reform without at the same time enacting a replacement—as congressional leaders currently plan to do—the damage would likely come much faster than intended. According to health policy experts, repeal without replacement would immediately throw insurance markets into disarray, and not only for those obtaining their insurance on state health exchanges. More than 4 million people nationwide would lose coverage right away as a result of repeal without replacement. There is no way around it—repealing the Affordable Care Act without simultaneously protecting the law’s coverage expansion would cause enormous harm.

To avoid taking insurance away from hundreds of thousands of Marylanders as well as millions more around the country, Congress should work to improve the Affordable Care Act, not toss it aside.