Post by DADDY O on Mar 23, 2017 17:29:02 GMT
an article by:
MARTY MOORE Suncoast News columnist
Mar 22, 2017
Deciphering health care coverage under either the 2010 Affordable Care Act or the proposed American Health Care Act is unfathomable to say the least. But those seven numbers will help you to understand what’s going on.
Health care accounts for 18 percent of the nation’s economy — kind of a big deal. That’s why Republicans as well as Democrats need to get this right. ACA, or Obamacare, started the process by banning callous insurance company practices like refusing coverage for preexisting conditions and lifetime caps that Republicans are under pressure to preserve as they dismantle the parts that weren’t as popular like personal mandates.
Problem is you can’t do one without the other. With the mandate gone and preexisting conditions excluded, most younger and healthier subscribers will simply opt out leaving mainly older folks and those in ill health to carry the burden of ever-increasing premiums. Why buy coverage if you know you can do so after you get cancer?
Which brings us to 24, as in the 24 million people the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says will lose coverage by 2026 under the AHCA, or aka Trump Care. For instance, a 64-year-old making $26,500 pays $1,700 for subsidized coverage under the ACA; under the AHCA’s $4,000 tax credit plan, he will be paying $14,600. You think he’s going to stick around?
Republicans persist they are returning health care to the “doctors and patients” and giving people “access” to “market-based” plans and carriers. So instead of the universal coverage Donald Trump promised we’re now being peddled universal access. Having “access” to coverage is like having theoretical access to a Ferrari 488 GTB; doesn’t mean you can afford one. This sounds way too similar to the bad old pre-ACA (Obama Care) days of obsolete, arbitrary, free-wheeling Big Insurance. Republicans have finally found their “death panel.”
If the bill does manage to scrape by in the House over the objections of the 40 members affiliated with the right-wing Freedom Caucus, which has labeled it “socialism” and Obamacare Lite, it goes to a Senate and faces a different set of political calculations. Over five million people on extended Medicaid, the majority of whom voted for Trump, live in states represented by 20 Republican senators who must determine if their obsession with repealing Obamacare and providing $500 billion in tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans is worth the political risk in 2018 of throwing those people under the bus.
No doubt the ACA has plenty of flaws but its current financial instability was actually created by Republicans, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (of Florida, of course), who inserted a provision into a 2014 spending bill that did away with so-called risk corridors designed to temporarily cover insurers’ premium shortfalls of some $2.5 billion. That’s why insurers are pulling out or jacking-up fees. This is all on the Republicans.
These are lives we’re talking about and all sides need to figure out a way to not condemn Americans to shovel-ready death care.
Marty Moore is a freelance writer living in Port Richey.
