Gov. Walker announces plan to repeal, replace Obamacare

While the Walker plan would repeal the Affordable Care Act, it appears to use some similar kinds of tools to promote coverage.

Unlike ObamaCare, his plan would also allow groups, such as small businesses or farmers, to band together to negotiate lower rates, and allow all individuals to purchase coverage across state lines.

A world where Obamacare is repealed, and the Walker plan enacted, is one where the individual market is friendlier to higher-income, healthy shoppers – but likely worse for the poor and the sick, both those seeking private coverage and Medicaid. Yet the Republican presidential candidate drew fire from one of his rivals, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), for not offering a sufficiently conservative alternative.

“On my very first day as president, I will send legislation to the Congress that will once and for all repeal Obamacare entirely and replace it in a way that puts patients and their families back in charge of their health care decisions”, the Wisconsin governor said in a speech at a machine parts company near Minneapolis.

Scott Walker on Tuesday offered the most-detailed plan for replacing… “Americans want more than just campaign promises, they want results”, he said. The value of these credits should increase every year, and we should set the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance on a glide path to ensure that it will equal the level of the credits within a decade. The amount would range from $3,000 in credits for those aged 50 to 64 and scale down to $900 for those age 17 and under, and go to those without health insurance from their jobs. Plus, HSAs could be rolled over to children, parents or grandparents – not just to spouses. My plan would incentivize states to pass meaningful lawsuit reform and encourage them to establish specialized expert reviews to determine if and when a doctor made a mistake, or commonsense legal defenses for doctors who demonstrate that they followed established clinical practice guidelines in a case. That’s a tall order for a plan that eliminates the $1 trillion in largely upper-income taxes imposed by the health law, and in a Congress run by anti-spending Republicans.

The bank gave the internships to land a sovereign wealth fund’s business, the feds say.

The plan also turns over Medicaid, a joint federal-state program to provide insurance for low-income Americans, to the states, with limits on federal funding.

Walker also said he would offer incentives for states to curb what he called “excessive litigation” that hampers the practice of medicine and loosen restrictions on health savings accounts.

So how much would all of this cost? For the period from April to June of this year, 11.4 percent of U.S. adults were uninsured, which translates to about 16 million people gaining coverage since the rollout of Obama’s health care law in 2013. That sounds an awful lot like Obamacare’s Cadillac tax, which is scheduled to be imposed on high-cost health plans in 2018.

Another 800,000 people were allowed to apply late because they had been given an incorrect tax form from the Obama administration – an error that renewed GOP criticism of the Department of Health and Human Services’s ability to handle complex tax changes under ObamaCare.