If it becomes law, the draft Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) proposed by the U.S. Senate could cause an estimated 1.45 million jobs to disappear by 2026 and trigger an economic downturn in all but one state, according to a report published today by Professor Leighton Ku and colleagues in the Department of Health Policy and Management at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and The Commonwealth Fund. The projected overall job losses from the BCRA are about 50 percent greater than the nearly one million estimated for the House-passed American Health Care Act by Ku and colleagues in an earlier report.
States that will see the worst job loss include New York (132,000), California (117,000), Pennsylvania (110,000), Ohio (99,000), Michigan (86,000), Florida (78,000), Illinois (71,000), New Jersey (60,000), Massachusetts (54,000), and Indiana (39,000). Although states that expanded Medicaid experience greater losses, even states that did not expand, like Florida and Maine, will see job losses and weaker economies as a result of the BCRA. Economic impact and job loss data for every state can be found in the report’s appendix.
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