Via Rawstory
The Independent Journal Review’s Haley Byrd reports that Meadows “choked back tears” while talking with reporters about the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the American Health Care Act.
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“Listen, I lost my sister to breast cancer,” an emotional Meadows told reporters. “I lost my dad to lung cancer. If anybody is sensitive to preexisting conditions, it’s me. I’m not going to make a political decision today that affects somebody’s sister or father because I wouldn’t do it to myself.”
Meadows pledged to conduct his own analysis of the CBO’s numbers and to add needed funds to the high-risk pools to ensure that people with preexisting conditions can get covered.
“In the end, we’ve got to make sure there’s enough funding there to handle preexisting conditions and drive down premiums,” he said. “And if we can’t do those three things, then we will have failed.”
CBO is the Congressional Budget Office That is the group that has the specific job to provide this information to Congress. This guy is a Congressman but he wants an “independent” analysis? Where’s he going to get that Walmart?
The fact is that this new CBO report does state that premiums for younger, healthier persons would be reduced as they purchase “skinnier” health plan that don’t cover all of the 10 Essential Health Benefits required by the ACA. It also says the the deficit would be reduced by $119 Billion over ten years as a result of reducing revenues by $992 Billion and spending by $1.1 Trillion. That’s the “Good” News, but everything after that is all bad.
This for example is the CBO chart on the effect the deficit.
As you can see Medicaid which is intended to provide care for children and the poor loses $834 Billion in exchange for $664 Billion tax cut. But what it says about what will happen to people with pre-existing conditions in nothing short of devastating.
Finally, about one-sixth of the population resides in states that would obtain waivers involving both the EHBs and community rating and that would allow premiums to be set on the basis of an individual’s health status in a substantial portion of the nongroup market, CBO and JCT anticipate. As in other states, average premiums would be lower than under current law because a younger and healthier population would be purchasing the insurance and because large changes to the EHB requirements would cause plans to a cover a smaller percentage of expected health care costs. In addition, premiums would vary significantly according to health status and the types of benefits provided, and less healthy people would face extremely high premiums, despite the additional funding that would be available under H.R. 1628 to help reduce premiums. Over time, it would become more difficult for less healthy people (including people with preexisting medical conditions) in those states to purchase insurance because their premiums would continue to increase rapidly. As a result of the narrower scope of covered benefits and the difficulty less healthy people would face purchasing insurance, average premiums for people who did purchase insurance would generally be lower than in other states—but the variation around that average would be very large. CBO and JCT do not have an estimate of how much lower those premiums would be.
And they aren’t the only group that would seem large out-of-pocket cost increases because annual and lifetime costs limits would be removed.
Services or benefits likely to be excluded from the EHBs in some states include maternity care, mental health and substance abuse benefits, rehabilitative and habilitative services, and pediatric dental benefits. In particular, out-of-pocket spending on maternity care and mental health and substance abuse services could increase by thousands of dollars in a given year for the nongroup enrollees who would use those services. Moreover, the ACA’s ban on annual and lifetime limits on covered benefits would no longer apply to health benefits not defined as essential in a state. As a result, for some benefits that might be removed from a state’s definition of EHBs but that might not be excluded from insurance coverage altogether, some enrollees could see large increases in out-of-pocket spending because annual or lifetime limits would be allowed. That could happen, for example, to some people who use expensive prescription drugs. Out-of-pocket payments for people who have relatively high health care spending would increase most in the states that obtained waivers from the requirements for both the EHBs and community rating.
Also about 23 Million more people would be uninsured over the next decade.
CBO and JCT estimate that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under H.R. 1628 than under current law. The increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number projected under current law would reach 19 million in 2020 and 23 million in 2026. In 2026, an estimated 51 million people under age 65 would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law. Under the legislation, a few million of those people would use tax credits to purchase policies that would not cover major medical risks.
Paul Ryan repeatedly says “ObamaCare is Collapsing” — even though that’s really the result of GOP sabotage of reinsurance program — how would this bill help stability?
The market for insurance purchased individually with premiums not based on one’s health status—that is, nongroup coverage without medical underwriting—would be unstable if, for example, the people who wanted to buy coverage at any offered price would have average health care expenditures so high that offering the insurance would be unprofitable.
So basically if you’re quite young and not suffering from anything chronic, you could make out like a bandit by purchasing a skinny plan or going without care entirely — in exchange for just about everyone else getting massively screwed. It’s literally robbing the old, sick and poor in order to give the young, healthy and wealthy a big payday.
Crying over this is the least anyone should do.