Sacramento County saw relatively lower health insurance premiums in 2016

How is the proposed American Health Care Act going to address this concern about deductibles? The answer can certainly be quantified for Merced County residents.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that 14 million people would lose health coverage next year under the House bill, and that the number of uninsured would grow to 24 million by 2026. This will send more profits to insurers and the wealthy elite while we pay higher costs for less care.

Northern California has higher health care costs than most of the rest of the country, largely because there is less competition among health systems and providers, said Micah Weinberg of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, who has studied Covered California extensively. Without the ACA, he simply would not have been able to afford the care that literally saved his life.

Another panelist at the town hall meeting, Grant Colfax, director of Marin County Health and Human Services, said 50,000 Marin seniors-or one in five Marin residents-are at risk of losing health care under the plan. I’d recently returned to the United States of America after several years living overseas in England, New Zealand, and Australia, all of which have some sort of universal health care system, and I passionately wanted the U.S. to move in that direction.

The GOP bill would phase out the ACA’s Medicaid or Medi-Cal expansion by 2020 which would cost California at least $8 Billion in funding and will impact approximately 4.1 Million Californians.

Upending the traditional 90:10 federal and state cost-sharing agreement, a Medicaid block grant would save federal dollars but push the expenses over to the state and require the General Assembly to raise your state taxes as your federal taxes would likely remain the same. “This is especially true of health insurance”.

Rep. Greg Walden says the health care replacement bill the Republicans are touting to replace the Affordable Care Act will “lay the groundwork for a patient-centered health care system”.

Under the Republican proposal, pre-existing conditions will not be an obstacle to coverage.

In Los Angeles, a 27-year-old earning $17,000 a year would see similar net premiums: $55 per month under the proposed law compared to $52 per month under the current law.

Lee said the GOP’s proposed tax credits, available for single incomes up to $75,000, fail to take into account the wide regional variations in the price of coverage. “That’s nearly died. After this bill is passed, it’s going to come right back”. She became temporarily uninsured when she aged out of her parents’ insurance because her other part-time job, at a clothing and furniture store, wasn’t bringing in benefits, either.

Medi-Cal covers a third of the state and almost half of Central Valley and is a fundamental financing pillar in the state’s whole health system. With our commitment to social justice and in good conscience, we can not support this proposed legislation.

Some Medicaid expansion states saw gains beyond coverage. Children should continue to have access to preventive services at no cost.

“People should take a look at some successes, using Canada and other places, and understand that this is not a scary idea, and it has been very successful throughout the world”, Kaplan said, referring to the Canadian publicly-funded healthcare system established in 1984. This would incentivize consumers to purchase private health insurance as a way of lowering their taxes without mandating that anyone do anything.