(9/28/2016)

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Years of Progress for Latinos, African-Americans, Women and Young Adults Could be Lost
 

Washington, DC – Donald’s Trump’s health care plan, which would “completely repeal” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), would strip individual coverage from more than a million Floridians, including 304,000 Latinos, 130,000 African-Americans, 227,000 young adults, and 940,000 women, according to an analysis released today by Families USA Action.

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This is a significant take-away because less than one-third (29 percent) of working-age Latinos have jobs that provide health coverage, and only 12 percent of Florida’s young adults (ages 18 to 25) have job-based insurance.

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Other key findings from the analysis include:

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• Trump’s plan would enable insurance companies to resume denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions – like diabetes, high blood pressure, or a previous cancer – threatening coverage for more than a million Floridians, including 220,500 working-age Latinos, 218,000 African-Americans, and 590,000 women who suffer from chronic health problems.
   

• The Trump plan would also eliminate the prohibition that prevents insurers from charging women discriminatory premiums. Before this prohibition was established, women were often charged as much as 30 percent more for the same coverage as a man. 
   

• The right for young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plan would come to an end, meaning 683,000 Floridians ages 18-25, who are now on their parents’ plan, would lose that coverage.
   

Trump would hit low-income Floridians particularly hard by replacing the Medicaid program with a block grant that would jeopardize existing coverage for approximately 1.2 million Latinos, 945,000 African-Americans, 954,000 adult women, and 891,000 girls under the age of 18.
 

Clinton, on the other hand, has proposed offering Florida additional federal funding to expand its Medicaid program, as 31 other states have done, which would extend coverage to 294,000 Latinos, 223,000 African-Americans, 509,000 women, and 195,000 young adults under 25 years of age.

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Clinton has also proposed providing additional subsidies to make plans purchased on the marketplace more affordable, offering financial assistance to Florida families who pay more than 5 percent of their income towards medical expenses, and generating new resources to help community groups get qualifying Floridians enrolled in a health care plan.

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The analysis – released as part of Families USA Action’s 2016 “Vote Your Health” campaign — is based on information the candidates have publicly provided, and then contrasted with publicly available government data or other reliable studies. Some of the populations in these numbers will overlap. 

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“The differences between the two candidates on healthcare is staggering and voters need to be made aware of that,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA Action. “We can keep making steady progress toward offering affordable health insurance for all, or go back to the dark days when insurance companies could discriminate against and deny coverage to people with chronic health problems.”

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Families USA Action plans to get this information in front of the voters through its own network, and in conjunction with its state partners like Florida CHAIN and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) Action Fund.

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“One of Florida CHAIN’s main priorities is to educate the public and policy makers on issues that impact access to health care, so spreading the results of this “Vote Your Health” analysis is important to us,” said Mark Pafford, Florida House Democratic Leader and CEO of Florida CHAIN. “We work in many medically underserved communities across the state, and we know from first-hand experience how devastating these Trump healthcare cuts would be. We will be working hard between now and the election to make sure voters know what’s at stake.”

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Rafael Collazo, National Political Director for the NCLR Action Fund, said his organization would also be rallying opposition to Trump’s proposals.

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“Donald Trump’s health care proposals would jeopardize the health coverage of over a million Latinos in Florida alone,” Collazo said. “The NCLR Action Fund is mobilizing over 100,000 Latino voters in Florida this election cycle to send a clear message that we need to build on the progress towards Universal Healthcare that the ACA provides and not the regressive health care policies of Donald Trump. Latino voters in Florida will know this election cycle how disastrous Trump’s policies would be for their families.”

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Families USA Action is a 501(c)(4) organization dedicated to achieving a health care system that works for everyone and to educating Americans about how the decisions they make at the ballot box affect their health and their families’ economic security.