Mental-Health Services Could Disappear with ACA Repeal

And, for those people, there never will be a good time to expand Medicaid, because it’s never been about what is right or sensible; it’s been a purely political entrenchment based on little more than a severe distaste for all things related to former President Barack Obama.

“All you have are a lot of rumors”, Cuomo said. “I can’t allow my daughter to be one of those statistics”.

The way that Congress, and the Senate in particular, passed the Affordable Care Act makes portions of it hard to change, much less repeal, the institute found.

In the end, there’s no getting around the fact that the ACA has gotten 20 million more Americans on health insurance, and uncounted lives saved and made easier.

“It’s easier to work up from a low-priced position than it is to work down from a higher-cost position”, said Josh Weisbrod, a health care consultant with Bain & Company. However, that metaphorical search for the ideal ACA replacement has now turned into an actual one-members of congress are literally searching for the GOP bill.

There will be real and measurable harm done if the ACA is repealed. Congress should honor its commitment to match state funds for Medicaid, including the current 95 percent federal match and the 90 percent match for the Medicaid expansion after 2020.

Under the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s latest draft, states that chose to expand their Medicaid population could continue to do so with federal funding until January 1, 2020, according to House GOP lawmakers and aides. Not Obamacare. Like Medicare, Obamacare is a specific program – the exchanges, and the plans available on them – not a nickname for an extremely broad piece of legislation.

Under the law, the government set up a temporary program called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, to serve as a bridge until the phase-in of the requirement that insurers accept people with health problems. If we look at just a top-line number such as how many people have health insurance – that is, they are able to access it and pay for it – the Affordable Care Act has had a huge net-positive impact.

The misperceptions need to stop before it’s to late, said Mona Mangat, a doctor of allergy immunology with a private practice who was there Friday to speak to the law’s merits.

Now the public has a new way to weigh in on what they would like the law to contain.

“That’s why I’m fighting”, she said. It sure sounds nice to those who don’t know much about health care policy. Plus, the law’s supporters didn’t effectively communicate what the ACA really does.

“People will die and the people who do get treatment will put a tremendous burden on our hospitals and providers in our rural state”, Stoll said. On the other, there’s the government telling you what to do.

Confronted with the rising popularity of the Affordable Care Act, the White House, Congress and Republican governors are grappling with disparate strategies to repeal, replace or fix it.

First, the plan proposes that some of the costs of health care should be covered by making changes to a long-standing tax exemption. Most pools had lifetime and annual limits on coverage.

“One of the reasons I feel we have gotten to this point, is that as citizens we haven’t done our due diligence in keeping up with our representatives”, she said. Your friends and neighbors are going to be affected, even if you are not. Catastrophic health insurance would achieve that goal.