March 9, 2017

Trump anti-healthcare update

The American Hospital Association, which represents 5,000 hospitals and health care organizations, over 270,000 physicians, and 2 million nurses, came out against the Republicans’ new health care plan.“We ask Congress to protect our patients, and find ways to maintain coverage for as many Americans as possible,” wrote Richard Pollack, the president and CEO of the American Hospital Association. 
Overall, it would be “a big transfer. This is a massive tax cut for unpopular industries and wealthy individuals,” said Andy Slavitt, who was acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the final years of the Obama administration. “It is about cutting care for lower-income people, seniors, people with disabilities and kids to pay for the tax cut.”...
 
There were many ways that Obamacare also redistributed the burden of medical costs — from the sick to the healthy, with provisions such as the one denying insurers the ability to refuse coverage to people with preexisting conditions; from the old to the young, with a mandate that everyone have coverage or pay a penalty; from the rich to the poor, with an array of new taxes.

By contrast, “the Republican plan, as outlined right now, really is centrally about income redistribution, of the reverse Robin Hood variety,” said Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economics professor who was chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers
Millions of people who get private health coverage through the Affordable Care Act would be at risk of losing it under the replacement legislation proposed by House Republicans, analysts said Tuesday, with Americans in their 50s and 60s especially likely to find coverage unaffordable.

Starting in 2020, the plan would do away with the current system of providing premium subsidies based on people’s income and the cost of insurance where they live. Instead, it would provide tax credits of $2,000 to $4,000 per year based on their age.

But the credits would not cover nearly as much of the cost of premiums as the current subsidies do, at least for the type of comprehensive coverage that the Affordable Care Act requires, analysts said. For many people, that could mean the difference between keeping coverage under the new system and having to give it up.

The American Health Care Act, as Republicans are calling it, would allow insurers to make premiums for older Americans five times what they charge younger workers ? provided that a state’s regulations allow for it. Obamacare had capped this ratio, known as an “age rating,” at 3 to 1.

The measure was chief among the reasons AARP, the nation’s largest organization for older Americans, cited in explaining its opposition to the House bill.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

go back to Trumps original ideas.. especially point number 3 which would merge the employed risk pool into the individual market risk pool. http://web.archive.org/web/20160316080118/https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/healthcare-reform