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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMillions Of Ill People May Face Extremely High Premiums Under House Bill, CBO Says
The Republican overhaul of the federal health law passed by the House this month would result in slightly lower premiums and slightly fewer uninsured Americans than an earlier proposal. But it would leave as many as one-sixth of Americans living in states where older and sicker people might have to pay much more for their health care or be unable to purchase insurance at all, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.
In some states, said the report, less healthy people would face extremely high premiums, despite the additional funding that would be available in the bill to help offset those increases.
The report incorporates the changes to the bill made just before it narrowly passed the House on May 4. Those changes included an amendment offered by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) that would let states waive some key provisions of the health law, including requirements to cover essential health benefits and to offer insurance to people with preexisting conditions at no extra cost.
CBO said the current version would result in savings of $119 billion over 10 years and 23 million more uninsured people than would be expected under the current law.
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Despite repeated claims from President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans that the Affordable Care Act is collapsing, the CBO specifically said that the market would continue to be stable in most areas under current law. It predicted the same for the original version of the House bill.
In fact, the only place the CBO specifically said the individual insurance market might become unstable is in states that decide to waive the ACAs coverage requirements. It did not guess which states might do that, but the report says that one-sixth of the population could be subject to that instability.
What is clear is that these waivers make life much, much worse for people with preexisting conditions, for older people, for sicker people, said Aviva Aron-Dine, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Obama administration health staffer.
The savings in the bill are mostly the result of capping federal funding to states for the Medicaid program for those with low incomes and scaling back the tax credits that help some people with low and modest incomes pay for private insurance. An estimated 14 million of the 23 million people who would no longer have insurance would otherwise have obtained it through Medicaid.
http://khn.org/news/millions-of-ill-people-may-face-extremely-high-premiums-under-house-bill-cbo-says/
Sinistrous
(4,249 posts)Five Hundred Twenty dollars per year per person by denying health insurance to those 24,000,000 people.
Gee, how christian How fiscally responsible.
How morally reprehensible.