Two million Americans lost health coverage/access in Trump's first year

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/buso-tma020320.php

News Release 3-Feb-2020
Boston University School of Medicine

Over the course of 2017, positive trends in insurance coverage and healthcare access from the Affordable Care Act reversed, particularly for low-income residents of states that did not expand Medicaid.

A new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study finds that two million more Americans avoided health care because of inability to pay, and/or did not have health insurance, at the end of 2017 compared to the end of 2016.

Published in the February issue of Health Affairs, the study examines the period from 2011 to 2017, showing positive trends in healthcare coverage and access following implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as Obamacare), and a reversal of those trends when newly-elected President Trump and Congressional Republicans began working to dismantle the ACA.

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They found that low-income residents of states that did not expand Medicaid were the hardest hit by the reversal, while those affected in expansion states were mostly middle-income residents who were eligible for the exchanges. In non-expansion states, the decrease in insurance coverage and healthcare access was four to five times greater than in expansion states.

They also found that the gap in healthcare access between higher- and lower-income people shrank from 2013 to 2016 by about 8.5 percentage points in expansion and nonexpansion states. Then, from the fourth quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2017, the gap increased by 2.6 percentage points in nonexpansion states (a relative increase of 11 percent) but continued to decrease by another 1.0 point in expansion states (a relative decrease of 8 percent).

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