those private prisons need to be filled:

[JHan]

The House’s Obamacare repeal bill would strand drug addicts without access to care

According to an analysis by Harvard Medical School and New York University researchers, Obamacare expanded access to care for 2.8 million Americans with drug use disorders. Depending on how far the House’s Obamacare repeal bill ultimately goes, that means up to millions of people struggling with addiction could be left stranded without potentially lifesaving care.

It would be one thing if President Donald Trump, who supports the House bill, had an alternative plan to deal with the opioid epidemic and future drug crisis. But Trump has only called for building his wall to slow the flow of heroin — something experts say a wall will fail to do — and vaguely demanded more spending on drug treatment. The Republican health care bill, by pulling back access to drug treatment, would accomplish the direct opposite of Trump’s plea on treatment spending.

*snip*

The bill does technically keep mandatory “essential health benefits” for private insurers, meaning individual market plans and small group plans will still have to cover, among other mandatory benefits, “mental health services and addiction treatment.”

But the bill creates a big loophole: In 2020, it will eliminate what’s known as “actuarial value,” which essentially requires that insurers pay for a certain amount of a person’s care. So under Obamacare a “silver” plan, which is more generous than “bronze” but less generous than “gold” and “platinum,” would have an actuarial value of 70 percent — meaning that insurers would generally pay for 70 percent of health care expenses, while enrollees would pay for the rest through deductibles, copays, and coinsurance. The House bill would essentially get rid of this, letting insurers set how much they’d pay for.

Experts worry that the repeal of actuarial value could in effect allow health insurers to check the box for drug treatment coverage without actually paying for such coverage — or at least without paying for enough to make drug addiction treatment affordable to the typical patient.

“You need all of those pieces together,” Richard Frank, a health economist at Harvard, told me. “You want to say these are the buckets that have to be part of an insurance plan, and then within that you need to offer coverage that protects people in certain ways — and that’s what the actuarial value does.”

[Doreen]

1. Yup, those people will get over their addiction being in prison

with no drugs ( not even for medical reasons ) and doing all of that free hard labor. We know that is what they are going to do in those prisons.