Ever since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Republican lawmakers have promised to repeal the law better known as Obamacare. Considering the Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the White House, it is clear that repealing Obamacare is not the difficult part, but replacing it as President Donald Trump and Republican congressional leaders have said they intend to do, is much more difficult.
The Republican healthcare plan recently received a bit of impartial analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the analysis indicates the plan could end up making the American people long for Obamacare.
Within one year of implementation the CBO estimates that as many as 14 million Americans will lose health insurance that now have it and that number increases to 24 million people over the next decade.
The analysis of the new bill, which is being labeled the American Health Care Act, can be found here. Besides millions of Americans losing healthcare coverage, there are other alarming findings by the CBO, namely an increase of insurance premiums by 15 to 20 percent in 2018 and 2019 due to the drop in the number of overall Americans enrolled. A huge player in this new bill is U.S. House of Rep. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). After the bill was introduced Ryan went on Twitter to announce “The American Health Care Act is a plan to drive down costs, encourage competition, and give every American access to quality, affordable health insurance.”
Despite Ryan’s assertion of what the goals of the new healthcare law were, according to the CBO the plan only increases costs and provides even less access to affordable health insurance.
Higher initial costs and less coverage for all Americans would be bad enough to indicate that Congress should reject this plan, but there are even more things to dislike as you dig deeper into the CBO’s report. One example of this is that the CBO found that those who could afford the new health insurance would pay higher out of pocket expenses, mainly in the form of deductibles which “would tend to be higher.” There is also a disparity between how much younger Americans would pay compared to older Americans with older Americans on the losing end. Over the next 10 years, the CBO estimates premiums for those enrolled who are 64 and older would increase by 20 to 25 percent.
The real crime of this new healthcare bill is who it targets and who will be most impacted by it. Ryan and administration officials will tout that this new law would cut $337 billion from the deficit in the next 10 years, but guess on whose backs this cost-cutting measure will be balanced on? A major component of this bill is the Republican-led effort to cut Medicaid, which is healthcare coverage for the poor. If passed, the bill would cap Medicaid spending and would reduce Medicaid funding by $880 billion (25 percent) by 2026, which alone would kickoff 14 million people from the program.
Obviously there are many components to this bill that Democrats and moderates are vehemently opposing, but Ryan and his Republican backers also have a fight ahead of them with members of their own party. One leading conservative member of Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan, (R-OH) railed against his own party’s bill. “This bill doesn’t unite Republicans. This bill doesn’t bring down the costs of premiums,” he said. There are very few people, except the ones who had a stake in crafting the legislation, who are backing this bill, which is one indication it would be a huge disaster as the president likes to say.
