Several fellow health wonks have chimed in. I spitballed perhaps 95%. Fann puts it at 96-97%. Cynthia Cox of the Kaiser Family Foundation thinks it could be even higher:
A few weeks ago, I noted that one of the numerous ACA-related provisions of the American Rescue Plan was this one:
Put simply, subsidized enrollees last year received around $6.3 billion in "excess subsidies"...they underestimated their income for the year 2020 and would normally be required to pay them back, but the ARP is waiving that "clawback" of overpayments for one year only in response to the pandemic.
Again, these are subsidies which were already paid out in 2020. The money is already in the hands of the enrollees (well, technically it's in the hands of the insurance carriers, but that in turn freed up an equal amount in the bank accounts of the enrollees, anyway). This provision simply says that the enrollees don't have to pay it back.
...there's also another small but critical detail included in the table above which escaped my attention last summer in H.R. 1425.
Take a look at the first line of Rep. Underwood's 2019 version (H.R 1868):
Over 100.0 percent up to 133.0 percent
Now take a look at the first line under both H.R. 1425 and H.R. 369:
Up to 150.0 percent
Notice the difference? I'm not talking about the "up to 150%" part. I'm talking about the removal of the "Over 100.0 percent" part.
If this were to pass the House & Senate and be signed into law by President Biden using this exact language, it would apparently eliminate the Medicaid Gap...albeit with a couple of major caveats.
Obviously a lot has changed since then, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I presume this is the most recent comprehensive, reliable data they've been able to compile:
Note:A few weeks ago, I ran a rough back-of-the-envelope extrapolation of partial data from the first 2 weeks of the ongoing COVID Special Enrollment Period and concluded that IF enrollment via the 36 HealthCare.Gov states was representative nationally, and IF the pace of the last 2 weeks of February held perfectly steady, it would mean around 666,000 new enrollees via HC.gov and 832,000 nationally by the end of March. Those were two pretty big caveats, of course, and as you'll see below, the reality wasn't quite as eyebrow-raising, though it's still pretty impressive.
Single Parent; Nuclear Family; Empty Nesters w/College-age kid; 60-yr old couple
Here's how much the "Nuclear Family of four" example (40-yr old ocuple with 2 children) would theoretically save, assuming they choose the avg. national benchmark Silver plan:
A couple of weeks ago I went on a bit of a rant about some terribly irresponsible reporting about how much the American Rescue Plan is spending on subsidizing private health insurance and how many people that money is expected to provide insurance premium assistance for.
The bottom line is that a whole lot of people got both the numerator and denominator wrong: Instead of being ~$53 billion to cover ~1.3 million people (which would be an insane $40,000 per person for just six months), it's actually more like ~$61 billion to help cover ~18.6 million people (roughly $3,300 per person per year on average).
On March 20th, the Vermont Health Connect ACA exchange joined other state-based exchanges in launching a formal COVID-19 Special Enrollment Period.
On April 15th, just ahead of the original SEP deadline, they bumped it out by a month.
Then, with the May deadline approaching, I took a look and sure enough, they've bumped it out another month.
And now, with the June deadline having come and gone...
Due to the COVID-19 emergency, Vermont Health Connect has opened a Special Enrollment Period until August 14, 2020.
I admit that this is starting to get a bit silly. At a certain point I'm guessing at least one of the state exchanges will just say "screw it" and open 2020 enrollment up for the full year.
When the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) achieved final passage on March 10th, it did so almost exclusively along party lines. I say "almost" because there was a single Democratic House member who voted against it: Representative Jared Golden (ME-02).
I fully understand the tightrope that some swing district Dems have to walk. To his credit, Rep. Golden voted to impeach Donald Trump not once, but twice (though he only voted in favor of one of the 2 articles of impeachment against him the first time around). I certainly don't expect every single Democrat to vote the party line on every single bill.
In the end, the bill passed anyway, if only by a handful of votes; my guess is that he even received Speaker Pelosi's unofficial blessing to vote against it, as long as she knew for sure it would pass regardless.
Everyone who spread this disinformation was getting both the numerator and the denominator wrong. In short, they were claiming that the federal government was going to spend up to $53 billion to provide healthcare coverage to a mere 1.3 million people for as little as a six-month period (which would amount to an insane $80,000 per year apiece if true...which it isn't).
As I explained in painstaking detail, the actual amount being spent per person is more like $3,300 apiece for anywhere from 14.2 million to 18.6 million people depending on whether you're going by the House or Senate CBO score (and the final version of the ARP was the Senate version).
