The new Senate bill's major provisions

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Among gunshot survivors, 51-year-old House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is an outlier. Such victims are more likely to be low-earning black men between the ages of 15 and 24. Scalise, who is white, does share one fundamental characteristic with these younger men: Being shot means he now has a preexisting condition in the eyes of health insurers. For most people, that status could mean more financial suffering under a Republican rollback of the Affordable Care Act.


The ever-increasing ranks of American shooting victims could face higher insurance costs and less coverage if the ACA is replaced by a bill mirroring those pending in Congress. Survivors could run up against annual or lifetime dollar caps on coverage, which are prohibited under the ACA. That could mean death for some and financial ruin for others, since costs for lifetime care can run into the millions of dollars. Lower-income survivors, which are the majority of victims, benefited from expanded state Medicaid coverage in recent years. Some of them could lose their health-care coverage altogether.

The consequences of such changes, according to a report published Thursday by the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence, is that taxpayers and consumers with private insurance will wind up paying much of the cost for that care. The gun-control group’s logic? Emergency treatment centers will have to offset debt from uninsured patients by raising prices for those who can pay and will require “greater contributions from other taxpayer-funded programs at the local and state level, which will result in higher private insurance rates and higher taxes.”

Don’t Expect Health Coverage If You Survive a Gunshot Wound - Bloomberg