The Problem With Paul Ryan's Go-To Obamacare Replacement Idea? Money
By TIERNEY SNEED Published JANUARY 17, 2017, 6:00 AM EST
As concerns escalate over the GOP’s plans to repeal Obamacare, and what it means for the millions with pre-existing conditions whose coverage has been guaranteed by the law, Republicans have pointed to so-called high-risk pools, as if they were magic bullet of sorts for covering seriously sick individuals.
However, using high-risk pools as a substitute for the Affordable Care Act would cost a boatload of money, health care policy experts tell TPM, and when states implemented it in the past, it was often consumers who were left picking up the tab or left out of the system entirely.
“It’s better than nothing, to help some people,” said Henry Aaron, a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, “but it’s a massive step backward from the Affordable Care Act.
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was pushing the idea again at a recent CNN town hall for his favored idea of protecting consumers with pre-existing conditions after an Obamacare repeal by creating what’s known as high risk-pools. The theory is that people who have the sort conditions that are the most expensive to cover --- and who, before the Affordable Care Act, were discriminated against by insurers -- are siphoned off from the rest of the individual market, to keep premiums low for healthy people. The proposal was in Ryan's "Better Way," a rough outline of ACA replacement ideas House Republicans offered last year, as well as the proposals of Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) and Senate Finance Chair Orrin Hatch (R-UT), making it a mainstay of GOP health care alternatives.
more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/high-risk-pools-obamacare-replacement
= new reply since forum marked as read
