someproteinguy wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how this new plan lowers health care costs. I mean, wasn't that supposed to be the point of all this legislation? Or has that gotten lost over the years? Seems like they're basically keeping the same broken program, just fiddling with some of the details a bit.
Isn't finalized yet, but based on the bullet points the GOP wants, here's a few:
1. Removes the mandates for coverage. Meaning, you can choose to only cover things you think you'll need instead of "everything". This, by itself, is a major point of cost savings, since the introduction of such is what caused premiums, co-pays, etc to sky rocket to unsustainable levels under Obamacare. You could literally just roll that back and do nothing else and costs to consumers will go down.
2. If they can put in changes to allow purchase of insurance across state lines, this may also reduce costs. In many states, there's may only be one or two insurers, in some just one, and now thanks to Obamacare, some states are heading in the direction of having *none*. Creating competition is always a good thing. How much this may reduce costs is unknown, but if implemented, it at least could do so.
3. Tort reform. This has been an issue for the GOP all along. Again, there's some question as to whether they can get this put in, but this can be a huge cost increase for care. Health care providers are basically faced with choosing between over covering or risking lawsuits if someone get sick because they failed to do that extra test or check for that extra thing. And the extra coverage is easier to just pass right into the insurance system and back to the consumer, so that's often what they do.
Those are just three right off the top of my head. A number of other elements are possible as well. Again, just removing many of the mandates and regulations put in place by Obamacare can reduce costs. Changing *where* the coverage gaps are can make a huge differences as well. I suspect that one of the big problems with the ACA was that it attempted to eliminate the coverage gap (point where government subsidies don't cover enough, but the person can't afford to make up the difference themselves). The problem is that all it did was push that gap upward in the economic system. Which, ironically, meant that instead of an earnings pool made up mostly of single people in their 20s with no children being in the gap, it became an earnings pool mostly made up of working class families. As you shift money to pay more in subsidies to fill the gap, that results in a cost increase to everyone who was previously above the gap, and some of them will have some combination of employers dropping their coverage and themselves being no longer able to pay out of pocket for insurance. Combine that effect with coverage mandates which *also* increase costs, and the result is a large gap in coverage at a higher economic level.
Which is "BAD". Just undoing that helps out a ton.