Impact of ACA rollback on kids will make you sick

More than 100,000 children in Pennsylvania are currently uninsured. But if a rollback of the Affordable Care Act is enacted, as Congress is now considering, that number could swell.

Such a move would be catastrophic for the health of kids and their families and tragically reverse gains made by the state. CHIP enrollment numbers statewide reveal an increase of 1,300 children in the last year alone, continuing a positive trend since 2013.

The Trump administration’s plan for a rollback would hit working families especially hard because many are increasingly unable to afford benefits for their children through their employer health plans and rely on public insurance as a safety net for their kids, particularly those making less than $50,000 a year (for a family of four), a recent Policy Lab study shows.

National projections indicate 82% of people who would become uninsured under an ACA rollback would come from working families, according to a report this week from the Urban Institute.  In PA, the share of uninsured people (adults and children) could skyrocket to 1.7 million in 2019. That’s more than 10% of the state population.

Even if President-elect Trump doesn’t get his way, Pennsylvania is well behind the curve nationally. More than half of the nation’s uninsured children reside in seven states, and PA is one of them; the state currently ranks a dismal 45th out of 50 states for most uninsured children.

Public insurance for children keeps thousands of working families in this state from having to resort to hospital emergency rooms as primary sources of healthcare, often after routine health issues have lingered to become full-fledged crises. Increasing public coverage also saves millions of dollars as the cost of treating a child in ERs is more than twice the cost of covering them through CHIP for an entire year.

Children in the Philadelphia region, including Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware and Chester counties, are still struggling from the Great Recession in the face of signs of economic recovery. PCCY’s Left Out series of reports make it clear we need stronger, more effective public policies, like Medicaid and CHIP, to safeguard the welfare of children.

We’ve found there are already more than 36,000 children in our region living without health insurance. We should be working to reduce that number, not consider ways to leave even more children out.