FactCheck.org

By: Lori Robertson and Brooks Jackson

Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey made the questionable claim that under the Senate bill “no one loses coverage” gained under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. The bill would reduce federal funding to expansion states, leading some states to restrict eligibility, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

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Kelly Whitener, an associate professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, expects some elimination of expansion coverage would be inevitable under the Senate bill. She told us that Toomey’s comment on “Face the Nation” is “accurate in part,” as he described the decline in federal funding for the expansion under the Senate bill.

But overall, Whitener said, “the reality is that fewer federal dollars mean fewer lives will be covered. This is especially true when the changes to the expansion population are considered together with changes to the Medicaid program overall, namely converting the program into a capped program through either a per capita cap or a per capita cap and block grant combination.” (The Senate bill would cap Medicaid funding to the states starting in 2020.)

“States will be struggling to find a way to continue coverage for populations that pre-dated the ACA (children, some parents, pregnant women, people with disabilities) as well as those made newly eligible under the ACA, and it’s impossible to see how they do so without scaling back on coverage eventually,” said Whitener, who worked for the Senate finance committee from 2008 to 2014 and worked on the ACA legislation.

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