The E wrote:Imaginos1892 wrote:0bamaCare was an expensive disaster. It would have to be repealed eventually, and the longer it was allowed to drag on, the more expensive and disastrous it would have been. They lied to get it passed, they knew it would blow up after 0bama was safely out of office, and it was starting to blow up even before that.
An "expensive disaster" without which hundreds of thousands or millions of people wouldn't have access to affordable health care. An "expensive disaster" that a majority of americans would rather see improved than repealed.
Repealing Obamacare is such a policy disaster that the republicans want to ram it through congress without debate. Not because this is an urgent priority, but because they know that too much public scrutiny would erode the last vestiges of non-Trumpet support they have.
You've been reading too much propaganda from the left. Obamacare is not European style socialized healthcare. It is a Frankenstein monster which combines the worst aspects of both the pre-Obamacare US system and the socialized system. And it has never worked well. It has worked so poorly from the start that the right wing conspiracy types claim it was deliberately designed to fail in order to force socialized healthcare on an unwilling US public.
Obamacare is comprised of 4 parts.
1) Young adults may stay on parents plan until Age 26
2) Expansion of medicaid (free care for the poor) and advertising to increase enrollment among already eligible poor people.
3) Federal regulation requiring people to buy what the government has defined as "good" healthcare insurance or be fined. As the initial benefits to insurance companies have been phased out these plans typically have become very expensive plans (~$12,000/year with varying levels of income based subsidies) with sky high deductibles ($7000-12,000 per year) but which cover a list of benefits the Feds think are necessary. A common complaint among people on these plans is that they already had insurance prior to Obamacare and now they are paying more and getting less (i.e. there is a mismatch in what the government requires and what they want from an insurance plan).
4. New requirements on employers to offer insurance to employees working 30 hours or more a week. Most employers who weren't offering health insurance responded by reducing hours to 29 hours a week i.e. employees not only didn't get health insurance they got a pay cut.
The big problem is that the Republicans pretty much universally want to repeal Obamacare. But they are arguing about what to replace it with.
1. Nothing. This is the Freedom caucus position. Healthcare regulation would then revert to the states which could individually choose to keep all or parts of Obamacare. No it wouldn't result in million of uninsured. It would result in a reversion back to pre-Obamacare rules in some states. About 15% of the population was uninsured at that time. About 10% is uninsured now. So a maximum impact would be 5% of the population. That is likely high since the government changed how it counted the numbers starting in 2013, in order to make enrollment look better. Also, 70% of that 5% (or roughly 4%) came from additional people on medicaid. Roughly half of those would already have been eligible but applied because of the advertising campaign. Even if laws reverted, they would still be eligible leaving a maximum impact of 3% of the US population.
2. Keep #1 - the age 26 provision but repeal the rest. This proposal is popular and cheap. Young people are healthy and don't require much medical care and it adds to parental peace of mind plus saves families money since they don't need to buy separate insurance for college students etc.
3. Keep #1 and part or all of #2 (medicaid), since most of the expansion was due to individuals in #2 this would keep most of them covered. There are various proposals on how much of #2 to keep. Some proponents of this want to keep more, others want to keep less. Some want individual states to have more control, others want less etc etc. There is a lot of fighting about details even among those who want this general proposal.
4. Add a high risk pool. For the vast majority of people what they need (and want) from the individual market is catastrophic care. If you don't have employer insurance and are buying it on your own, it is a great deal cheaper to buy insurance that only covers big things (car accidents, cancer etc) and pay for your broken arms and medicines out of pocket. This is not true for for people with chronic conditions (diabetes, autoimmune disorders). The idea behind high risk pools is that instead of everybody paying for top notch coverage that is expensive that people with these types of medical conditions would be offered subsidies (lots of arguments over the details of what these subsidies should be among supporters of the subsidies ranging from state provided medical insurance to tax credits etc).
5. Repeal #3, is universally popular. Most of the people covered under it already had insurance and they are NOT happy with the changes. The devil is in the details again. Lot of arguments about when to do it. Insurance companies will need to start offering the old products again and they'll need time to prepare. How much time is the argument.
6. Repeal #4 is also popular since it never worked well and resulted in pay cuts for a lot of people it was supposed to help. Again the fight appears to be over timing.
