Some Republicans Think They May Have A Health Care Deal
Source: Huffington Post
WASHINGTON ― GOP moderates and conservatives are nearing a deal on health care that in theory could get the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act out of the House and over to the Senate. The changes also might move Republicans even further away from passage ― no one really knows.
The deal, brokered between House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Tuesday Group co-chairman Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), would allow states to get waivers eliminating the so-called community rating provision ― the rule that prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions. In order to obtain the waiver, states would have to participate in a federal high-risk pool or establish their own, and satisfy some other conditions.
In exchange for that conservative concession, the amendment would reinstate the Essential Health Benefits that were already taken out of the bill ― though, again, states could waive those provisions as well if they were able to show that doing so would lower premiums, increase the number of people insured, or advance another benefit to the public interest in the state.
Thats according to a white paper describing the amendment, which is the result of weeks of negotiation between Meadows and MacArthur. While they have both agreed to the amendment, supposedly representing a number of conservatives and moderates respectively, the amendment is still being reviewed by the Senate and House GOP leadership.
Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/some-republicans-think-they-may-have-a-health-care-deal/ar-BBA3QjW
Warpy
(111,274 posts)and did nothing about it except try to repeal something that worked?
Uh, no, color me deeply skeptical that it doesn't involve pipe dreams and magical thinking, i.e. vouchers and savings accounts.
All they're ever going to do is defund it to make it unworkable so they can kill it and leave us with nothing.
cstanleytech
(26,293 posts)companies fuck over people.
SergeStorms
(19,201 posts)free up a ton of money to use for their tax cut "plan". Repealing the ACA was supposed to be the cornerstone of their tax cut give-away to the rich. When the greatest "negotiator" and "deal maker" in the world couldn't get his RepubliCANT ducks in a row, that put the skids on the tax cut "plan". They HAVE TO get this monstrosity passed, or Mr. Tiny Hands is going to add a whole lot of zeros to the national debt. He's going to anyway, but without that money from fucking over the poor and middle class, he's going to rival the sainted "Gipper" in growing the national debt.
TeamPooka
(24,229 posts)The new plan to cut out the heart of Obamacare
Community rating: the defining feature of the earliest health insurance and the one thing that keeps carriers from gouging customers now
By Wendell Potter
healthinsurance.org contributor
April 14, 2017
While Congress is taking its annual Easter recess, Republican leaders are quietly developing a new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. If there is one thing you dont want to see in that plan, it is the gutting of something called community rating.
Community rating is the one thing that keeps insurance companies from gouging most of their customers. Its the thing that helps makes the health insurance marketplace even remotely fair.
Community rating: about to be demonized
But you can expect a big PR campaign to demonize community rating. Youll be told that it stifles competition. Youll hear that we need to get rid of it to reduce the cost of premiums and encourage more young people to jump into the insurance pool. If the PR campaign is successful, by this time next month, youll believe that only a Karl Marx-loving socialist would support community rating.
But heres the one thing you need to know: it was the defining feature of the very first health insurance plans sold in this country. And it originated in Texas, which is about as far as you can get ideologically from the land of Marx.
How it prevents discrimination
What community rating means is that no one in a given community can be charged more for the same policy because of age, gender, health status or occupation. If the community rating requirement is deep-sixed, insurance companies will once again be able to charge people in their 40s, 50s and early 60s far more than they can today.
And theyll also once again be able to discriminate against women and people whove been sick in the past, and even against people who have jobs that insurance company underwriters dont like. If health insurance bean counters ruled the world as theyd like, cops, firefighters and even nurses would be out of luck. Underwriters consider their jobs to be risky. Theyd be declared uninsurable, just as would people born with birth defects or other congenital disorders.
Born in Texas (not Russia)
Not only are community-rated health plans not part of some communist plot, they developed as a free-market alternative to health care reform ideas proposed by leaders of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early decades of 20th century. And they got their start in the Lone Star State.
We can trace the origin of community-rated plans to Baylor University Hospital in Dallas. As I wrote in my first book, Deadly Spin, a Baylor administrator, Dr. Justin Ford Kimball, devised a strategy to deal with the hospitals mounting expenses. His idea was to have groups of local residents, beginning with Dallas teachers, pay 50 cents a month and receive up to 21 days of hospital care if needed-during any year. It was called the Kimball Plan, and it became so popular that other nonprofit hospitals began offering similar plans.
Although those first plans mandated that enrollees use only the hospitals that initiated them, so-called free-choice plans, which allowed enrollees to choose their own participating hospital when they got sick or injured, began popping up all over the country. They were all community rated, and they were all operated on a nonprofit basis.
In just a few years, all those tax-exempt plans were united under a common name, Blue Cross, and a common trade group, the Blue Cross Association. Similar plans offering coverage for physician care soon became common. They were united under the name Blue Shield. It wasnt long before all the Blues came together under an expanded trade group that continues to this day: the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.
For years, almost all health plans in the United States were community rated and operated on a nonprofit basis. Many of the Blues still claim nonprofit status, as does Kaiser Permanente and several other local and regional plans.
The rise of unaffordable coverage
Eventually, though, big for-profit life insurance companies looked at the health insurance market and saw an opportunity to develop a profitable new line of business. Their idea was to offer policies with lower premiums but only to the youngest and healthiest in a community.
That desire to make a few extra bucks for shareholders was the beginning of the end of true community-rated plans and the beginning of insurance premiums becoming unaffordable to people that insurance underwriters didnt favor. When the for-profits lured the most desirable customers away from the nonprofit Blues, the Blues had no alternative but to mimic the big insurers. They, too, began assembling an army of underwriters.
As years went by, many of the Blues began converting to for-profit status. (Most of the for-profit Blues are now united under the name Anthem, a huge New York Stock Exchange corporation.) As more and more insurers even the remaining nonprofits abandoned community rating and began hiking premiums for all but the youngest and healthiest males (and even young and healthy men who worked in jobs that sometimes put them in harms way for societys benefit), the ranks of the uninsured began to swell.
Increasing numbers of Americans couldnt buy coverage at any price before Obamacare as underwriters began blackballing prospective customers for one reason or another. And if youre blackballed by one insured, good luck persuading another company to sell you coverage. One of the first questions on a health insurance application before Obamacare was, Have you even been denied coverage? The nonprofit Blue Cross Blue Shield company in my home state of Tennessee rejected 34 percent of applicants in 2011 before most Obamacare requirements went into effect.
Fairness restored to the health insurance markets
When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the number of uninsured Americans had grown to more than 50 million. While some of the uninsured were people who made a conscious decision to go bare, most were people who simply had been priced out of the health insurance marketplace and they were priced out largely because of the consequence of the demise of community rating.
Over the objections of insurance company executives and underwriters, Congress included a provision in the Affordable Care Act to restore community rating as much as possible. Thanks to that one provision, that one thing, insurance companies can no longer blackball you because youre a breast cancer survivor or charge you more for being born with a congenital disorder or being born female for that matter.
The one exception is that insurers can charge you more as you get older thats why its called modified community rating but they cant charge older folks more than three times as much as younger folks for the same policy.
A repeal target worth resisting
The restoration of community rating, coupled with tax credits and subsidies to help people pay their premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, has done more than anything else to restore a little bit of fairness in the health insurance marketplace.
Dont let the coming campaign of misinformation about community rating fool you. We cant afford to go back to the days when insurance company bean counters determined whether you could get the care you need.
Call your member of Congress now before they consider another round of ACA repeal legislation and tell them that any bill that removes community rating is a bill that will make coverage unaffordable again.
Wendell Potter is the co-author of Nation on The Take: How Big Money Corrupts our Democracy and founder of Tarbell, an independent, nonprofit multimedia journalism platform dedicated to investigating the powerful forces that influence public policy.
Source: https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2017/04/14/the-new-plan-to-cut-out-the-heart-of-obamacare/
Follow us: @EyeOnInsurance on Twitter | healthinsurance.org on Facebook
https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2017/04/14/the-new-plan-to-cut-out-the-heart-of-obamacare/
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)community rating. But, even then, I think it is wrong to saddle young people with higher premiums than they might otherwise pay. I'm fine with taxing others, reducing military, etc., to subsidize elderly or poor.
elmac
(4,642 posts)so the poor and elderly are screwed by any GOP tweaks.
C Moon
(12,213 posts)An idiot.
Skittles
(153,169 posts)elmac
(4,642 posts)its how they get their kicks.
Skittles
(153,169 posts)it's not like they hide the fact they only care about the rich / corporations
EVERYTHING they do and say displays their utter contempt for the average American
MedusaX
(1,129 posts)Is that it creates a dual reality in which both sets of constituents can be shown verbiage that makes them happy ... and in both cases there is the possibility that their preferred outcome will come to fruition.....
but it puts the responsibility for making that determination directly in the hands of the state governors.....and therefore all "blame" also will be attributed to the state governor(s).
And that allows the house/senate members to play good cop...
and say "well, we gave the states the opportunity to make whatever decision was in the best interest of their citizens... the choice was theirs alone.... so, you see, we did everything we could.... it isn't our fault you got screwed... blame your state governor"
Kablooie
(18,634 posts)They will pass some piddling little changes to the ACA that won't make any difference and then go into the 2018 election proclaiming that they tossed out Obamacare and came up with a new plan that works wonderfully.
They can't risk damaging it this early because voters would have time to feel the effects by 2018 and turn on the GOP.
yardwork
(61,650 posts)This most recent suggestion would make premiums go skyhigh, and the Republicans will own it.
People want better, cheaper coverage. That's what The Donald promised them. Anything less is a failure of the GOP.
sofa king
(10,857 posts)Like, say, lower taxes for the rich?
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)fool people, but they can't transfer a trillion dollars from healthcare to tax breaks for billionaires without cluing some in. They've already lost a lot of trust among their own on healthcare. Many would also inevitably be badly hurt by cutting back of and outright loss of coverages; even if they delay implementation, many will be worried and angry.
And 2018 is already coming up fast.
mdbl
(4,973 posts)It just lets the states do what the last repuglican bill did. That way the Repugs in congress can claim they didn't do it.
ProfessorGAC
(65,076 posts)Because what this basically does is cut everything that worked out of ACA and then making a "state thing" so they can say "Don't blame us. It was the states that made those decisions".
it's cowardly and hard hearted and we need to hit every channel we've got at our disposal to show what a useless piece of junk this proposal is and how it will hurt millions of people.
Javaman
(62,530 posts)randome
(34,845 posts)"But people want more and more and more choices!"
No. They don't. They just want shit to work.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Don't underestimate the long-term effects of a good night's sleep.[/center][/font][hr]