Think tank: GOP health care plan could cost OH billions

I am grateful there is a bipartisan consensus to maintain many critical patient protections, but if Congress moves to repeal the law without an adequate and immediate replacement, the health care market could collapse, leaving vulnerable people like me with gaps in coverage.

The CBO says insurance premiums could drop 10 percent, but that 14 million Americans will be squeezed out of Medicaid as a result. Before the ACA, people with these conditions were often denied insurance. But those who benefit would be predominantly young, healthy and less likely to need insurance or older, well off and more likely to be able to afford insurance.

NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest public health system in the country that serves mostly low-income people, made a rare decision to create its own insurance plans to help maximize revenue in the changing health climate. After all, he’s the one who says many of his patients “drove over a hundred miles to see us as I was the only OB clinic to accept Medicaid”.

But it is not yet clear how Republicans will be able to do that without also making everyone buy insurance, which leads to our listener question this week.

First, a little background.

The provision, which allows young adults to remain on their parents’ health insurance until the age of 26, faced an uncertain future with President Donald Trump’s first executive order, made January 20. Even as a Constitutional conservative, I have no problem with the federal government trying to help those who do not have health coverage by developing a group health care policy to reduce costs. That could lead to an insurance “death spiral” – a loaded term both sides of the aisle have thrown at each other’s health reform plans frequently over the years but one that has truly bad consequences. Few if any Democrats are likely to support either bill, meaning that any points of order are likely to be sustained. Let’s go with coverage first, go through these numbers.

In principle, this might have been fixed when the legislation got to the Senate, where a healthy majority (56-43) voted for the bill, but that wasn’t enough to redirect the revenues to the Medicare trust fund because the ACA was enacted as a “Budget Reconciliation” bill, subject to special rules.

Because of the federal matching guarantee in place now, states must ensure that residents get a certain level of services.

One plan would be eliminated entirely under the bill and tens of thousands would lose coverage on the other under the Republican bill.

Massa’s conclusion: Caring for the health of people before they come into the hospital is unfamiliar territory. With a weekly 60 hours of clinical and classwork required for her degree, she said it would be almost impossible to find a job that provides decent health coverage. Under the new plan, this mandate-as well as the requirement that companies with 50 or more full-time workers provide employee coverage-will be removed. This may happen if an individual leaves his job or gets laid off.

Designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation, the poll was conducted from March 6-12 among a nationally representative random digit dial telephone sample of 1,206 adults.

Conceptually, the goal of Obamacare – no underwriting for pre-existing conditions, guaranteed issue, plan and provider choice and more affordable premiums through a sliding scale of tax credits – was laudable. If many of us stand to lose our health insurance, we must take care of our body until we can work the insurance matter out. So she’s the ideal person to ask.

Gordon said she was anxious about some of her classmates who have taken time off between their undergraduate and graduate degrees.

ROVNER: Well, not right now. So there’s nothing at the moment.

“It would be politically unpopular for them to look like they were taking away people’s coverage if something wasn’t on the horizon”, Halabi said.

ROVNER: Yes, it is. So it’s not just the serious diseases.

Less than a month before Election Day, for example, the Republican delivered a big speech in New Hampshire, outlining his “plan to end [the] opioid epidemic in America”. Why do you say it’s going to be hard?

Mahan pointed to an HIV crisis in IN as an illustration of how the proposed bill could stymie efforts to deal with public health crises. And that’s not because they didn’t want to but because they can’t. How are they doing with their operating budget?

INSKEEP: Oh, they can’t change the entire law anyway, OK. Without guaranteed availability, they will be excluded from coverage until they do pay up. But they did change a different piece of it. And the fact remains, thanks ultimately to the individual mandate, that all insured Americans now have many free preventive services than we ever did before, that we can not now be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition and that we can not now lose insurance because our medical costs have become too high.

Individuals signing up through the marketplaces in many states are older and sicker. If the consumer catches up on premium payments within this period, the insurer must reinstate coverage and pay the pending claims.

ROVNER: That is exactly correct. And he has been one of the most publicly skeptical Republicans about this legislation. He went on: “Just, like, homeless people”.

INSKEEP: Sue, thanks as always.

INSKEEP: She’s with Kaiser Health News.

But even if the community benefit requirements remain intact, she and others fear this accountability effort could take a hit.