IU expert: CBO report could threaten health plan

When New York resident Katie Needle got her time at the mic, she laid into Price with some hard-hitting facts about the care Planned Parenthood provides to patients around the country. Health insurance is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.

“This proposal to end the Medicaid program as we know it would lock Virginia into the very lean and mean program that we have now into perpetuity”, Michael Cassidy, president and CEO of The Commonwealth Institute, a Richmond-based fiscal policy analysis group that focuses on issues that impact low-income and middle-class people, said in an interview earlier this week. Here’s the rub – the insurance middleman and the cost. Former governor Tom Corbett, a Republican, made it more hard for the poor to obtain health insurance; at one point 89,000 children had been purged from Medicaid, some with life-threatening illnesses.

Seriously. For seven years, Republicans have been talking about repealing Obamacare and replacing it with something else – and this is the best they can come up with? They include emergency services, hospitalization and maternity care. The polar opposite in a health care system is where the public is expected to pay for most of their primary care out of pocket – and then shell out thousands more to underwrite the extremely costly people with dread diseases. That’s over half of their income, so expect to be helping your aging parents out as health care bills chew through their paychecks. In other words, if you want your premiums to fall by two-thirds just kick the least healthy 10 percent off your health plan. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) puts it: “You’ll pay more for less”. Those with less means will likely need to understand the fine print in their insurance policies to realize (often too late) the many things that are not covered and the many ways they can be denied care.

Bargain Basement Health Care. Without access to care through something like the healthcare marketplace, she would never have been able to start her company, Sarah Best Strategy, where she works with a team of contractors to help clients from large corporations to government agencies wage effective social media campaigns.

The Republican healthcare plan could signal the beginning of the end for employer-based healthcare insurance, a perk that millions of Americans take for granted. And it is even more deceptive to fantasize that a California patient would choose a network of Minnesota doctors in order to save money and buy a policy across state lines. So where do they get the money to pay for the insurance subsidies they plan to offer? Trump and Ryan are not telling the truth when they claim that Obamacare’s in some kind of “death spiral”. An article healthinsurance.org published earlier this week by Charles Gaba explains how the GOP replacement plan will cause many to lose their insurance.

Some economic scholarship backs up the idea that people are more willing to pursue self-employment once they have access to insurance. Under Obamacare, on the other hand, people received different tax breaks depending on their income. Tax credits don’t help them one bit.

So, when my own congressman, Rep. Jason Lewis (R-MN), a frosh on the budget committee, shared a meme comparing the AHCA to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on Facebook, it became clear that the GOP members of that committee ignored the conclusions of the CBO and made a decision to deploy some #alternativefacts.

In examining the combined impact of the bill’s tax credit changes and increase in age rating, AARP found that premiums for older adults could increase by as much as $8,400 for a 64-year-old earning $15,000 a year.

We either want health care insurance for everyone, or we don’t. What Obamacare did create was increased government funding of health care.