Kicking 24 million Americans off health care just wasn't unseemly enough for Republicans the first time around, so now they’ve devised something crueler: Making premiums so high for the people who need healthcare the most, that they can't afford it.
The idea is to take people who have illnesses (i.e. pre-existing conditions) out of the regular pool of insured people and relegate them to higher risk pools. This inevitably jacks up insurance costs for the sickest people because insurers must spend more money on their health care—an expense they pass on to the insured.
So here's a look from the Center for American Progress at just how much more we're talking about, and it ain't chump change.
Just to pull out a few numbers: Any woman who had a pregnancy without major complications (i.e. is a mom) would see a 425 percent premium increase, or $17,000-plus more; having asthma will cost people a 106 percent premium increase, or $4,000 more; having major depressive and bipolar disorders will cost people a 208 percent premium increase, or nearly $8,500 more. In explaining the exploding premiums, Greg Sargent writes:
Topher Spiro, a health policy analyst at CAP, tells me that these sums were calculated by using actuary “risk scores” for each condition, which detail how much someone with that condition costs insurers relative to a healthy person. (Focus on the first two columns for now; the third will be elucidated by the report itself.)
“If insurers can charge sick people higher premiums than healthy people, they would add a surcharge to premiums that reflects this additional cost,” Spiro says. “The premium markups would be unimaginable, adding thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to premiums. They would be priced out of the market and quarantined into high-risk pools.”
In other words, many or most people in those risk pools would be priced out of the market altogether.
Meanwhile, the new GOP plan would keep in place the old plan’s phase-out of the Medicaid expansion, which would itself result in 14 million fewer people on Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
So now they’re ripping coverage out from under 14 million who qualified for the Medicaid expansion and pushing coverage out of reach for people who are contending with serious illnesses—or those who have simply had a baby and haven’t hit menopause yet. I hesitate to ask this, but how could they make it any worse?