How the GOP threatens harm to red state residents, as revealed in a new study

How the GOP threatens harm to red state residents, as revealed in a new study

By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 5:10 p.m. EST

It’s become a cliche to point out that Republican economic and health care policies threaten to impoverish residents of their own states, and that many of those people perpetually vote against their own material interests.

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But the Build Back Better bill that Democrats are close to passing makes this cliche truer than ever — and a new study details this phenomenon with a fresh level of granular clarity.

The study, from the centrist Democratic-leaning group Third Way, finds that four top provisions in BBB would deliver a cumulative average of thousands of dollars in benefits to typical families across the country.

What’s innovative about this study is that it shows ways in which average red state families in particular would benefit from specific BBB policies. Notably, no Republican voted for the version of BBB that passed the House — the basis for this study — and it’s very likely none will vote for it in the Senate.

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The study’s top line finding is that the four provisions in BBB it examined, which center on health care and child care, would deliver average annual cumulative benefits of $7,400 to an average two-parent family of four. They would deliver $15,000 in average cumulative benefits to average families composed of a single mother with two kids.

The study found this by creating two categories of families — one with two parents and two kids, the other with a single mother and two kids — and calculating how much in benefits would go to average families in those categories in each state from the four benefits.

Those four provisions are the expanded child tax credit, subsidies for child care, the cap on premiums for health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges and the extension of coverage to people without insurance in the 12 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid.

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But what’s interesting here is how these benefits break down by policy in each state, which you can peruse on the study’s map.

Take the extension of subsidies to people in the 12 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, which are almost all red. Third Way ran the numbers for me, and found that the average benefits this confers on lower-income families with a single mother and two kids in those states is worth $5,500.

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tells me Third Way’s numbers seem solid to him. As Levitt points out, the sum total of provisions expanding the ACA will help people everywhere, but the filling of the Medicaid gap will disproportionately benefit people in those particular states.

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“Families throughout the country would benefit from the health care provisions in the Build Back Better Act,” Levitt tells me, “but the benefits are greatest in the dozen states that have not expanded Medicaid.”

Those states “are primarily in the south,” Levitt continued, and by passing BBB, Democrats “will be providing health coverage to poor people who overwhelmingly live in red states that have declined to provide that coverage themselves.”

GOP state legislatures and governors refused to expand Medicaid in those states, of course. But now Republicans representing those states in Congress will vote against fixing the humanitarian problem that this created.

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Or take the expanded child tax credit, which sends checks to most American families and begins phasing out at higher incomes. Robert Orr, an analyst at the Niskanen Center who has done extensive work on the child tax credit’s impact, says Third Way’s numbers mesh with his own.

Orr notes that Third Way’s study shows the positive impact of the policy tends to be disproportionately higher on average families in many red states, because median incomes tend to be lower, meaning the checks are larger as a proportion of those incomes.

“The credit is more impactful for the typical family in these states, providing a larger percentage increase in these families’ overall incomes,” Orr told me.

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In fairness, the BBB policy that would subsidize child care would have a disproportionately larger impact on blue states, Third Way found. But Zach Moller, who conducted the analysis, tells me this is largely “because child care costs are higher on average in blue states.”

“We know families in red states need child care too,” Moller said. “And there are still substantial benefits for them.”

“The BBB would help Americans in every part of the country,” Moller continued. “Some of these benefits go disproportionately to red states. Which means at the end of the day, Republicans are voting against helping families in these states.”