A research group found that Romney's plan would be worse than doing nothing. Study: 72M uninsured under Mitt plan

Mitt Romney’s health care plan wouldn’t just insure fewer people than “Obamacare” — it would make the uninsured problem worse than it would have been if the law had never passed, according to a comparison of the two plans by a research group with a history of pro-“Obamacare” studies.

The analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based health care research foundation, found that under Romney’s health care plan, the uninsured population would soar to 72 million by 2022 — 12 million higher than if nothing had been done at all.


By contrast, if President Barack Obama’s health care law is fully implemented — including complete state participation in the now voluntary Medicaid expansion — the number of uninsured people would drop from 47.9 million in 2011 to about 27.1 million people in 2022, the report estimated.

The Commonwealth Fund produces studies that often cast the national health care law in a favorable light, and spotlight the shortcomings of the American health care system compared to other countries.

The number of insured Americans would rise in every age group under the Affordable Care Act and fall in every group under Romney’s plan, Sara Collins, vice president for Commonwealth’s affordable health insurance program, told reporters in a conference call Monday.

The report says most of the difference is due to Romney’s plans for Medicaid, which he would turn into block grants, and the expansion of Medicaid that’s planned under the ACA. The gap between those two proposals accounts for about 80 percent of the difference in their impact on the uninsured, according to the analysis.

The Commonwealth Fund report is based on research by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who worked on both the federal and Massachusetts health reform laws, and is the latest dire forecast from ACA sympathizers about health care under a Romney administration.

The Romney campaign said the “flawed report” misstates Romney’s proposals and depicts “a fantasy world where Obamacare has been a success.”

“Under ObamaCare, Americans have seen their insurance premiums increase, small businesses are facing massive tax increases, and seniors will have reduced access to Medicare services,” Ryan Williams, a Romney spokesman, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “The American people did not want this law, our country cannot afford this law, and when Mitt Romney becomes president he will repeal it and replace it with common-sense, patient-centered reforms that strengthen our health care system.”

Last week, a Families USA report, also based on Gruber’s work, found that middle class families in the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, among others, would pay about half as much total for health care if the ACA is fully implemented rather than repealed and replaced with Romney’s plans.

In the Monday conference call, the Commonwealth Fund researchers said that they used “relatively conservative” assumptions to flesh out the barebones of Romney’s Medicaid plan — that the federal block grants would grow with the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent, that states would lower their contribution to match the federal one, and that they would take half of the savings from providers and half by reducing eligibility.

A Romney campaign aide disputed that characterization, however, arguing that the assumption that all states would enact identical changes is typical of a Washington-based attitude that fostered a failing program.

In total, 26 percent of non-senior Americans would be without health insurance in 2022 under Romney’s plan, compared to 10 percent under the ACA, Commonwealth reports, with a higher concentration of uninsured in the southern and western states.

The report pulls no punches on Romney’s Medicare proposal, either. It says that by repealing the federal health law, his plan would render the Medicare trust fund insolvent in 2017. Under the Affordable Care Act, the trust fund is expected to last until 2024.

Repeal would also stop the ongoing changes to fill in the “doughnut hole” and reinstate cost-sharing for preventive services and annual wellness visits, the report states.

Under what the report terms the Romney-Ryan premium support model for Medicare, “beneficiaries would likely face higher out-of-pocket spending, if the level of premium support failed to keep pace with growth in health care costs.”

The Romney campaign disputed that conclusion, noting that unlike Paul Ryan’s earlier Medicare proposals, Romney’s Medicare plan does not include “ a global cap" to put a hard limit on Medicare spending.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 12:01 a.m. on October 2, 2012.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the report’s assumption of the growth rate in Romney’s Medicaid block grant proposal, which was described incorrectly in the Commonwealth Fund’s own report. The group’s estimate assumed that the block grants would grow at the rate of the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Vivyan Tran @ 10/02/2012 03:20 PM CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the report’s assumption of the growth rate in Romney’s Medicaid block grant proposal, which was described incorrectly in the Commonwealth Fund’s own report. The group’s estimate assumed that the block grants would grow at the rate of the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent.