Weekly Economic Snapshot 7/17 - 7/21

Economic Facts for this Week

• Congressional Republicans’ TrumpCare plan would strip coverage from more than 441,000 of the 1.8 million U.S. veterans covered by Medicaid.
• The $45 billion sweetener for opioid treatment proposed for the Senate TrumpCare bill would fall $183 billion short of what is needed just to cover those who would become uninsured by the bill.
• Contrary to Republican talking points, the ACA individual market is not collapsing: in the first quarter of 2017, insurers posted their highest gross margins yet at $99 per member, or more than double their margins for the same period in 2016.
• House Republican leadership’s 2016 tax blueprint would reduce economic output by 0.5 percent by 2026, adding about $3.7 trillion to the nation’s debt over the same time period. Over 20 years, the plan would decrease output by 1 to 2.6 percent with an additional $4.3 trillion to $5.5 trillion in national debt.

 

Chart of the Week

The Senate’s TrumpCare bill will cut $772 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, or nearly 25 percent, and 35 percent by 2036, ending federal support for Medicaid expansion, imposing spending caps, and ending Medicaid as we know it. By slashing federal Medicaid funding, TrumpCare shifts a huge financial burden onto states, forcing them to make tough choices about whether to deny coverage, restrict benefits, or cut other parts of their budgets to keep offering people health care. If these cuts occurred today, on average a state would have to cut its contributions to higher education, for example, by nearly 90 percent to cover the loss and maintain its current Medicaid coverage. To see how Medicaid cuts would affect your state’s budget, see here.

 

ICYMI

• A team of researchers presented new estimates on the economic costs of climate change for the United States. Each 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures will cost 1.2 percent of GDP, though the poorest U.S. counties could see costs as high as 20 percent of county income.
• Researchers found that the gender earnings gap in the United States increases over a woman’s lifecycle, resulting from both pay discrimination by employers and female and male workers sorting into relatively low- and high-paying employers.

 

Coming This Week

• Friday 10:00am: State employment and unemployment for June 2017 - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.toc.htm