Americans with severe illness anxious over GOP health plan

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act estimated that a previous version of the GOP replacement bill would cut coverage for 500,000 New Jersey residents, and 24 million nationwide, based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

But Seaford Rep. Peter King, who voted in favor of the bill, says the warnings are a bit off base. They includes House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

“It’s part of the DNA of the United States to somehow maintain choice in health care insurance plans”, said Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

So who’s telling the truth?

The new Republican plan would let some states allow insurers to charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions, but only if those people had a lapse in insurance coverage. So what’s the health care and health insurance industry’s incentive to keep premiums, fees for service, and vital drug prices for these patients down?

It would end enhanced federal funding for Medicaid expansion and curtail federal support for the overall Medicaid program, which provides coverage for more than 70 million people.

“Not only would the AHCA eliminate health insurance coverage for millions of Americans, the legislation would, in many cases, eliminate the ban against charging those with underlying medical conditions vastly more for their coverage”. “It’s bad how little we care for the sick”. And even if we don’t fund it well enough.

“There are so many other legislative priorities on the agenda that it’s hard for retirement security to get any air space, as pressing a concern as it is”, said Shai Akabas, director of fiscal policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Whatever the reasoning behind providing a comprehensive corporate health care plan, the outcome is favorable because good coverage largely relieves the debilitating anxiety that reduces productivity. States requesting waivers would have to set up programs – such as high-risk pools – to protect insurers from high-cost patients but no details on the process have been determined.

THE FACTS: One of the bigger changes to health care under the Republican plan is that it would allow insurers to consider the health risk of customers applying for new coverage if they had a recent gap in coverage. Pre-Obamacare, survivors of rape could be denied health care coverage, as experienced by one woman who took anti-AIDS medication after she was raped.

Instead, the ACA requires everyone in the statewide coverage pool to pay the same rates, spreading the higher cost of sicker enrollees among all plan members. Under the Obamacare, insurance providers were not allowed to charge older consumers more than three times what that charged younger ones.

It is a far larger population, including the millions of self-employed and the owners of small businesses with a few employees, collectively termed “the individual market”, that will be devastated by this change. That led to restrictions on enrollment and benefits, such as a standard six- to 12-month waiting period to cover pre-existing conditions. It repeals an additional 0.9 percent payroll tax on high-income workers and a tax on investment income for wealthy Americans, costing the U.S. Treasury $299 billion over the next decade.

Here are the health issues they called pre-existing conditions prior to Obamacare.

“Virtually every health care analyst that you talk to will tell you that these things just don’t work very well”, said Slavitt.

This is especially true for states that expanded their Medicaid programs and could now see a huge pool of federal health care money evaporate.

Those changes would result in 2 million fewer Americans – many of them older folks – in the individual market, according to CBO.

Obamacare helped provide health insurance coverage to thousands of HIV-positive people by expanding Medicaid, “a jointly funded, federal-state health insurance program for low-income and needy people”. Keehan specifically referenced the proposed restructuring and cuts to Medicaid and said that the legislation jeopardizes protections for those with pre-existing conditions.

“They wrote this bill in secret and now they want to rush it through before people know how badly it will balloon the national debt”, said Reed.

Lesley Clark contributed to this article.