What impact will the roll-out of the US Affordable Care Act (ACA) – ObamaCare – have on health insurance coverage of people with HIV?  A recently published “issue brief” on behalf of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers a first estimate (Kates & Garfield (K&G)).

The ACA includes a provision to expand Medicaid 1. by extending it to non-disabled childless adults (a group at present excluded), and 2. by raising the threshold of eligibility from the present 100% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) to 138%.  This would have considerable impact on uninsured HIV infected-people, as a large proportion of them are non-disabled childless adults, and relatively poor.  Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, responsibility for the implementation of this ACA provision rests ultimately with state legislatures.  Thus far, only 26 of the 51 states have plans to go ahead with it.  The authors of the brief give estimates, firstly for the impact that the ACA would have had but for the Supreme Court ruling, and, secondly, for the impact it will have, assuming implementation by just the 26 states that of stated their intention to go ahead with it.

In the case of full implementation of Medicaid expansion, say K&G, c.47,000 of the c.70,000 uninsured adults retained in HIV care would immediately be brought under Medicaid, while a further c.20,000 could benefit from the second major ACA provision relevant to the HIV-infected – namely, the subsidized insurance coverage which will be supplied by Health Insurance Marketplaces (HIM).

But, with just 26 states planning to expand Medicaid provision, only c.26,500 additional people will be brought under Medicaid.  Of the c.20,000 who ought to have qualified, but will now fail to do so, some 5,000 may be able to gain subsidized cover with HIM (those at between 100% and 138% of FPL), while the remaining c.15,000 (those under the 100% bar for subsidized coverage by HIM) will remain entirely uninsured.  Many people in this situation will seek coverage under the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, as they have done in the past.

So the beneficiaries of ACA among the HIV-infected will, according to this brief, be considerably reduced by the Supreme Court ruling.  But does it really matter whether the HIV-infected of the US are treated through an expansion of Medicaid, or through the Ryan White program?

The authors of the brief seem to be in no doubt that ACA would represent an improvement on the present arrangements – and principally for two reasons.  The first has to do the 700,000 HIV-infected (63%) who are undiagnosed, or not linked to – or else not retained in – HIV care.  A proportion of these (the authors reckon as many as 124,000), newly eligible for Medicaid under ACA, could have been brought into regular medical care through the program.  This is the first opportunity missed.  The second has to do with the possibility of addressing the unmet needs of a particularly needy population (i.e. the c.200,000 HIV-infected who are currently uninsured but eligible for cover under ACA) on a more general and ongoing basis than is possible through the Ryan White program.  These, according to K&G, are the benefits which will be largely foregone in states that do not to ratify the expansion of Medicaid.