Chaffetz: Americans may need to choose healthcare over new iPhones

Jason Chaffetz said people shouldn’t buy iPhones if they can’t afford healthcare, and he couldn’t be more wrong with his assumptions about poverty and healthcare access.

“Americans have choices”, Chaffetz said.

“They’ve got to make those decisions themselves”, he added. “As an American, you have to make choices, so sometimes you have to make decisions in your life on where to make investments”.

“The House GOP proposal seeks to reduce what the federal government spends on health care, and that inevitably means more people uninsured”, Levitt said.

An iPhone 7 mobile phone, Apple Inc’s latest model, costs $649 on the company website. With tax, that comes to around $800. In the general case, this would not even buy you a month of health coverage.

“We’re always anxious”, he replied. Chaffetz argued that Americans are personally responsible for their health care, rather than it being a service that the USA government should provide.

But the expensive-iPhone zero-deductible scenario isn’t wholly realistic. “We can act now, or we can keep fiddling around and squander this opportunity”, Brady told a news conference. As Sean Gentille at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette tweeted, “jason chaffetz knows how much an iPhone costs. he knows how much healthcare costs. he is willfully lying”. So for a better point of comparison, let’s call it one iPhone to two years of insurance. In their place, the new plan would create per-capita caps for Medicaid, and new refundable tax credits for several age groups. “We’ve got to be able to drive those cost curves down”, he said. We have to get labwork done.

Granted, Barack Obama once deployed a similar message about the need for Americans to prioritize health care above consumer spending – and that wasn’t enough to make his signature law popular (at least, not while he was in office). At the time, insurance family premiums cost workers $3,354 each year, Kaiser found. Or, for that span, the price of 23 iPhones.

The new bill Chaffetz is pushing would do away with subsidies to help people purchase insurance, and by all estimates, would push millions of Americans off of their health care. It has caused a lot of us to budget. But that’s more an exercise in self-comfort than reality.