Health insurance experts estimate that more than 600,000 veterans will be uninsured in 2017, if more states do not expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The finding comes from a new report, prepared by researchers at the Urban Institute with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that looks at the insurance status of veterans and their family members and the impact of the ACA on people who served in the military.
The Urban Institute researchers say the percentage of veterans under age 65 who report neither having health insurance coverage nor using Veterans Affairs (VA) health care fell from 11.9 percent in 2013 to 6.8 percent in 2015, likely due in large part to the health insurance provisions of the ACA.
In 2017, if additional states do not choose to expand Medicaid under the ACA, a projected 327,000 uninsured veterans will live in states that have not expanded Medicaid, compared to 277,000 uninsured veterans living in states that have expanded eligibility for the program. Of the more than 300,000 uninsured veterans in nonexpansion states, just 39 percent would be eligible for Medicaid or subsidized marketplace coverage available under current expansion decisions; however, another 38 percent would be eligible for Medicaid if eligibility was expanded in their state. Seventy percent of uninsured veterans living in states that expanded Medicaid are eligible for the program or financial subsidies to help them purchase insurance. The Urban Institute authors identify the need for more effective outreach to enroll uninsured veterans in insurance programs.
Among the report’s other findings, researchers note that of the remaining uninsured veterans, half (50.3%) work full-time and roughly four in 10 (43.4%) have incomes that could make them eligible for Medicaid under the ACA if they lived in a state that participated in the ACA’s expansion.
“There is a tendency to think that all veterans get health coverage through the VA, which is far from the case,” said Kathy Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “While the coverage situation for vets has improved a great deal, hundreds of thousands of veterans remain uninsured, many of whom would be eligible if their states expanded Medicaid.”
