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The long-awaited Republican health-care plan has finally arrived, but certain key differences with the Affordable Care Act — more widely known as “Obamacare” — are likely to affect Americans’ wallets.

According to estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the recently proposed American Health Care Act — unofficially going by the names “Trumpcare” and “Ryancare” — would raise the average health-insurance premium for an individual policyholder by 15 to 20 percent just one or two years from now and lower federal subsidies. In contrast, the CBO projected, average Obamacare premiums would decrease 10 percent by 2026.

In order to gauge the AHCA’s impact on people who buy their own insurance, WalletHub’s analysts compared the differences in premium subsidies that the average households in 457 U.S. cities would receive under Obamacare and Trumpcare. Read on for our findings, commentary from a panel of experts and a full description of our methodology.

1. Main Findings
2. Ask the Experts
3. Methodology

Main Findings

Embed on your website<iframe src="//d2e70e9yced57e.cloudfront.net/wallethub/embed/33588/geochart.html" width="556" height="347" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> <div style="width:556px;font-size:12px;color:#888;">Source: <a href="http://ift.tt/2nJoJtE;  

Overall Rank	City	Total Score	Effective	Annual	Difference	Annual	Adjusted
1	Alaska	5.69%	$3,066	-46.85%	$4,237	6
2	Delaware	6.02%	$3,246	-43.74%	$3,830	1
3	Montana	6.92%	$3,728	-35.37%	$3,561	3
4	Wyoming	7.45%	$4,015	-30.40%	$4,312	2
5	Nevada	7.72%	$4,161	-27.86%	$4,028	7

Ask the Experts

For more insight into the future of U.S. health care in light of the Republicans’ proposed plan, we turned to a panel of experts for their thoughts on the following key questions:

1. What is the likelihood that the AHCA will pass the House of Representatives and Senate as written? What is the most likely path forward?
2. Which provisions of the AHCA do you think should change?
3. What would be the single most impactful policy change to improve quality and reduce the cost of health care?
4. Is it possible for the AHCA to increase health-care access even though it will increase the number of uninsured?
5. What are the political implications for President Donald Trump and the GOP if they fail to pass any significant health-care legislation before the 2018 midterm elections?

Methodology

To assess the impact of the proposed Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) on American households, WalletHub’s analysts compared 457 U.S. cities of varying sizes based on the difference in premium tax subsidies that a joint-filing household would receive under the AHCA, or Trumpcare, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, which is currently in effect, in each city.

Please note that our sample considers only the city proper in each case and excludes the surrounding metro area. We organized our sample according to the following population-size guidelines:

• Large City: More than 300,000 residents
• Midsize City: 125,000 to 300,000 residents
• Small City: 75,000 to 125,000 residents

In order to measure impact, we first determined the subsidies that a two-person, joint-filing household would receive under each health-care law.

For Obamacare subsidies, we referred to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator. Because Obamacare subsidies are based on an individual’s age, income and location, we assumed for each city a two-person household earning the median income. We also assumed a two-person household, both members of median age, enrolled in Marketplace coverage and not using tobacco. We then averaged the subsidies that each household would receive in the 10 most populated zip codes in each city.

For Trumpcare subsidies, we referred to the age-based dollar amounts, which are broken down as follows:

City	Overall Rank
1	Alaska
2	Delaware
3	Montana
4	Wyoming
5	Nevada

Finally, we calculated the difference in subsidies from Trumpcare and Obamacare for each city and used the resulting differences to rank the cities. We attributed a rank of 1 to the city that registered the highest difference.  

Sources: Data used to create this ranking were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau and Kaiser Family Foundation.

from Wallet HubWallet Hub


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