GOP focus on lowering health premiums may undermine benefits

Bread for the World is alarmed that 23 million people, including 14 million on Medicaid, would lose health insurance coverage under the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed by the House of Representatives on May 4.

The House’s bill would reduce the federal budget deficit by $119 billion over 10 years, the CBO said.

If approved, by 2026, the GOP health care bill or AHCA will leave 51 million US citizens under 65 uninsured and bring around 20% increase in premiums. While the AHCA contains a few provisions meant to counterbalance this, such as high-risk pools, they’re largely symbolic in nature and, according to the CBO, won’t prevent the worst fears of repealing Obamacare from being realized.

While the report found that, in general, premiums would decrease, it found that would mostly be due to the sky-high cost that would be faced by older and poorer people.

The new estimates will serve as a starting point for GOP senators starting to write their own version of the legislation as they consider changing the House’s Medicaid cuts, tax credits and other policies. “Right now, insurance companies must cover millions of Americans such as myself who suffer with a pre-existing conditions“.

With polls showing that only about 1 in 5 five Americans support the House bill, Republicans still have many issues to resolve. The CBO assessment of the American Health Care Act also does not detail the premium baseline that it relied on, but the Fact Checker was able to calculate it through a reference in a 2016 CBO report.

Democrats blasted the bill and said the CBO report proved it would be catastrophic for millions of people who would lose health insurance.

The bill is expected to lead to 23 million more people becoming uninsured by 2026 than would be the case if Obamacare remained intact.

The CBO also projects the cost of care for many conditions would increase substantially in those states that choose to waive the federal Essential Health Benefits, including maternity care, mental health and substance abuse services. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a key swing vote in the Senate, said that “Congress’s focus must be to lower premiums with coverage which passes the Jimmy Kimmel test”, referring to the late-night host’s tearful monologue about the health problems of his newborn son.

After many years as a nurse, my knowledge of our health care system’s difficulties in dealing with chronic illnesses and low-income patients is close and personal.

Premiums on average would fall compared with President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul – a chief goal of many Republicans – but that would be partly because policies would typically provide fewer benefits, said the report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The Congressional Budget Office said that in states that take full advantage of the House plan’s waivers to insurance requirements, healthy people might flock to skinnier, lower-premium plans. And states could elect to charge more for pre-existing conditions. Rather than trying to improve the Affordable Care Act, Trump and Republicans are now destabilizing it by not guaranteeing payment to insurers to pay subsidies under the present ACA. “We got to get premiums down and we got to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions can get affordable coverage“.

We don’t know how the high-risk pools will work in the future, how much states will contribute and whether federal funding will be almost enough.