Republicans in Congress are trying to figure out what to do on the health care front, now that they’ve refused to continue additional subsidies for people on the ACA health care exchanges. Millions more people are projected to go without health insurance and others will be forced to spend twice as much as they have been on insurance premiums. Ryan Cooper reports for The American Prospect that they have no good idea; they are moving backwards.
Some Republicans are following through on President Trump’s foggedaboud health insurance idea, to send people the money that would have paid for the subsidies. He claims people would be better off spending that money directly on health care, without an insurance middleman. But, you don’t have to be a genius to know that any money people receive would not cover the cost of many basic health care needs, let alone complex ones. The whole purpose of health insurance is to pool risk, not to burden each individual with the full costs of their care, which could be financially devastating.
As Cooper explains, the Republican plan actually takes critical benefits away from working people and gives the money saved to the wealthiest Americans in the form of lower taxes. At the same time, it takes our taxpayer dollars and deploys them to subsidize corporations. In sum, programs to support working people have little place in a capitalist society, but corporate welfare is somehow justifiable.
Every man and woman for themselves does not work with health care. With health care, some are lucky and some are less so. Pooling risk protects everyone. Leaving health care costs to each individual–a purely market-based approach–is tantamount to saying that people who get sick or injured are out of luck unless they are extremely wealthy.
For this reason, many people embrace national health insurance–one large insurance pool that guarantees health care to everyone, regardless of where they live, their age or how sick they are. The bigger the pool, the lower the cost. A progressive tax system makes national health insurance affordable to everyone.
But, Republicans have never liked Medicare and Medicaid. Even though Medicare is for everyone, rich and poor, and it is an earned benefit–everyone who gets it pays into it–the government, not the private marketplace, is responsible for people’s coverage.
State health insurance exchanges established through the Affordable Care Act create a system that theoretically is market-based. But, corporate insurers benefit most from denying care and are near impossible to regulate. You can’t stop them from keeping the best specialists off their networks and making it hard to get complex care. So, they end up “working” for the people who don’t need care and failing the people who most need it. And, still subsidies are needed to make the insurance affordable for many.
Here’s more from Just Care:
- Trump asks drug companies to lower prices for Medicaid drugs, or else what?
- Trump’s tax bill means a $500 billion cut to Medicare
- Millions of Americans face higher medical bills.
- How to save Medicaid dollars? Remove Medicaid’s insurer middlemen
- Immediate effects of Trump’s tax bill
