A month in to Healthcare.gov, real-life winners and losers

Also sure losers are undocumented immigrants, who are ineligible for benefits or subsidies under the act.

And for now, at least, small businesses lose out because of the Obama administration’s ongoing delays launching a health insurance marketplace for small businesses. (Healthcare.gov, by contrast, is an insurance marketplace for individual consumers.)

Too soon to say

Another group that many commentators count as losers are the hundreds of thousands of consumers who have received cancellation notices from their individual health insurance companies because their policies don’t meet criteria set forth in the Affordable Care Act.

I hesitate to call all of them losers because some of them will be eligible for subsidies from the federal government to offset the cost of their new health insurance, and others will pay less in the new marketplace for better coverage. To be sure, some people clearly will lose out because they will pay more for their coverage — and their benefits won’t be all that much better to offset it.

What others say

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza had an interesting piece this week in which he spoke to economist Jon Gruber, who broke down winners and losers this way:

About eighty per cent of Americans are more or less left alone by the health-care act—largely people who have health insurance through their employers. About fourteen per cent of Americans are clear winners: they are currently uninsured and will have access to an affordable insurance policy under the A.C.A.

But much of the current controversy involves the six per cent of Americans who buy their own health care on the individual market, which the A.C.A. has dramatically reformed. Gruber argued that half of these people (three per cent of all Americans) will have little change to their polices. “They have to buy new plans, but they will be pretty similar to what they had before,” he said. “It will essentially be relabeling.”

The other half, however, also three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.’s more stringent requirements for individual plans. A significant portion of these roughly nine million Americans will be forced to buy a new insurance policy with higher premiums than they currently pay.

Economist Justin Wolfers tweeted the previous few paragraphs as a chart: