WASHINGTON — The House-approved Republican budget could leave as many as 44 million more Americans without health insurance over ten years, according to a new nonpartisan report.

The debate surrounding the blueprint has focused on the plan to replace Medicare with a system of subsidies to buy private insurance. But that wouldn’t happen for 10 years, and in that time, the proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act and turn Medicaid into a program of block grants for states could significantly grow the ranks of the uninsured.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study, conducted with the Urban Institute, concluded that those two elements of the plan would leave between 31 and 44 Americans uninsured, depending on various state scenarios that consider eligibility laws and efficiency gains, if the GOP blueprint becomes law. ‘Most of the people who would lose Medicaid coverage would become uninsured,’ the study says.

The report gives Democrats another political weapon to attack the Republican plan, which they intend to hang around the party’s neck in the 2012 elections.

A spokesman for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who drafted the plan, questioned the Kaiser-Urban study’s assumptions, telling The Associated Press that the proposal would allow Medicaid to grow ‘at a sustainable rate, so […]