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Trump Signs Executive Order That Could Effectively Gut Affordable Care Act's Individual Mandate
President Trump signed an executive order late Friday giving federal agencies broad powers to unwind regulations created under the Affordable Care Act, which might include enforcement of the penalty for people who fail to carry the health insurance that the law requires of most Americans.
The executive order, signed in the Oval Office as one of the new president's first actions, directs agencies to grant relief to all constituencies affected by the sprawling 2010 health-care law: consumers, insurers, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, states and others. It does not describe specific federal rules to be softened or lifted, but it appears to give room for agencies to eliminate an array of ACA taxes and requirements.
[...] Though the new administration's specific intentions are not yet clear, the order's breadth and early timing carry symbolic value for a president who made repealing the ACA — his predecessor's signature domestic achievement — a leading campaign promise.
[Continues...]
Congressional Budget Office: Obamacare Repeal Would Be Catastrophic
U.S. Uncut reports
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its official analysis of the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, and top Republicans hate it.
The CBO based its findings[1] on H.R. 3762 (the Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act), which was the 2015 Affordable Care Act repeal bill that passed the House of Representatives. The nonpartisan budgetary agency determined that within one year of President Obama's signature healthcare reform law being repealed, roughly 18 million people would lose their health insurance. In following years, when the expansion of Medicaid codified into the Affordable Care Act is also eliminated, the number of uninsured Americans would climb to 27 million, then to 32 million.
Additionally, for those remaining Americans who didn't lose their health coverage from the initial repeal process, health insurance premiums would skyrocket by as much as 25 percent immediately after repeal. After Medicaid expansion is taken away, premiums costs would have gone up by roughly 50 percent. The costs continue to climb, with the CBO estimating a 100 percent increase in premium costs by 2026.
CBO analysts particularly focused on H.R. 3762's repeal of the health insurance mandate that requires all Americans to have health insurance, and the bill's elimination of subsidies for low-income families that make health insurance more affordable. The CBO found that pulling out those cornerstones of the Affordable Care Act would "destabilize"[2] the health insurance market, leading to a dramatic increase in premium costs.
[1] PDF Google cache
[2] Duplicate link in TFA.
House majority leader says no set timeline on Obamacare replacement
The republican party still has no plan to put into place as a replacement for the ACA. In fact:
Asked how soon House Republicans could unite behind a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, McCarthy said Friday in a "CBS This Morning" interview, "I'm not going to put a set timeline on it because I want to make sure we get it right."
But McCarthy promised that an ACA substitute will be "one of the first actions we start working on."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @06:23PM
All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
As Republicans in Congress move to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Washington state’s experience in 1990s with health-care reform may offer a lesson. Repealing unpopular parts of the state’s health-care law led to the collapse of the insurance market.
Washington has long been on the national vanguard, be it in aerospace, software, e-commerce or wide-ranging health-care laws undone by subsequent Republican electoral victories.
As congressional Republicans look to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), Washington’s experience with health-care reform in the 1990s offers an illustrative example of the possible consequences of repealing only the unpopular parts of a law designed with many interlocking pieces.
What began as the most ambitious health-care overhaul in the nation was hacked away to the point where it became impossible to buy individual health insurance anywhere in the state.
Here’s what happened:
The Legislature passed a comprehensive health-care law in 1993, after several years of study and debate.
More than 15 years in advance, it looked a lot like the ACA.
It required most employers to provide health insurance to employees. It required individuals to get health insurance or pay a penalty. It required insurance companies to sell policies to anybody — whether they had pre-existing medical conditions or not. It required those policies to cover a set of basic benefits — things like prescription drugs and maternity care. It expanded Medicaid to give insurance to those who couldn’t afford it.
Like the passage of the ACA, the 1993 law led to huge Republican victories in the next election.
In 1994, Washington Republicans won their biggest victory in nearly 50 years, winning back the state House and coming within one seat in the state Senate.
They campaigned on ditching the unpopular parts of the health-care law, most specifically the mandates.
And they followed through.
The 1993 law, unlike Obamacare, never went into full effect.
The 1995 Legislature repealed most of it, including the individual mandate to carry health insurance. But they kept the ban on denying insurance for pre-existing conditions, known in insurance-speak as “guaranteed issue” — you’re guaranteed to be offered insurance, regardless of your health.
“Republicans came in, and they decided to gut the bill, not dissimilar to right now,” said Dr. Bob Crittenden, an aide to Gov. Jay Inslee, who, working for then-Gov. Booth Gardner, wrote the original version of the health-care bill. “They took out the mandate and left the guaranteed issue. The market went into a tailspin one-and-a-half years later.”
The defanged health-care law cratered the market for individual insurance policies (as opposed to employer-provided insurance or government-provided insurance, like Medicare and Medicaid, which was largely unaffected).
By 1998, three years after the changes to the law went through, 17 of the 19 insurers selling individual policies in Washington had left the state, according to a study by an insurance-industry group.
By 1999, it was impossible to buy an individual policy in Washington. Every insurer had pulled out.
...
[full article at the seattle times] [seattletimes.com]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @04:11AM
Technical question: if it becomes impossible to buy insurance, will it drive the healthcare cost down? IMHO, current high cost is because doctors know they can charge more to insurance companies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @04:55AM
No. Healthcare costs will go up even more.
All the uninsured will end up in emergency rooms which are the most expensive form of treatment and are mandated by law to treat people.
Those people will go bankrupt and hospitals will eat the costs which will then end up on the bills of the people with insurance.
That is what had been going on for decades before obamacare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:16AM
So... as always, the problem is government.
Take your dictates and GO AWAY!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:29AM
> Take your dictates and GO AWAY!
Where "go away" means die in the gutter.
Man you are a fucking asshole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @06:21AM
What, do you think you're going to live forever?
Everyone dies, man. Accept reality.
(Score: 1) by Chrontius on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:07AM
Do you really think that people won't, when the choice is die in a ditch or rob a bank, won't try to rob a bank?
Worst case scenario, they die of a gunshot wound, and either die relatively quickly and cleanly, or they die in a warm, comfortable hospital bed on a morphine drip. Second-worst scenario, they go to prison, and receive treatment for the duration of their incarceration on the taxpayers' dime.
If we're going to pay to treat them anyway, it's cheaper if we don't pay to rent them a room in a fortress, too.