The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has served as the main vehicle to expand health coverage in Colorado and nationwide for the past six years. But its days may be numbered as a Republican Congress and President Donald Trump work to repeal it.
The Colorado Health Institute is monitoring and studying the future of the ACA and proposals to replace it, with an eye toward how the changes would affect Colorado.
This first report provides an understanding of what the ACA has done in Colorado when it comes to health insurance and the cost of coverage. These baseline measurements can serve as a tool to evaluate how the ACA compares to various options to replace it.
The ACA has driven change in Colorado’s health care landscape since it became law in 2010. Perhaps its most visible impact has been an historic drop in the uninsured rate. Just 6.7 percent of Coloradans did not have insurance in 2015, according to the Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS), down from 14.3 percent in 2013 — the year before the ACA’s major provisions took effect.
Today, an estimated 500,000 Coloradans are receiving coverage because of the ACA — about 400,000 through expanded eligibility for Medicaid and another 100,000 through subsidies to buy private insurance through Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s online marketplace. Young people and low-income earners saw the largest coverage gains and are the Coloradans most at risk if the law is repealed.
In addition to coverage expansions, the ACA contains multiple initiatives and features, some of them less well known than others. For example, Colorado’s $65 million State Innovation Model to integrate primary and behavioral health care came from the ACA. This report looks specifically at the ACA’s effects on health insurance coverage in Colorado — its successes and shortcomings.
The law’s most obvious effect in Colorado has been on health insurance coverage.