Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
A majority of Americans don’t like Obamacare. It’s a mess at best and a complete failure at worst. The Heritage Foundation released a report with details about why Obamacare is a failure.
Aside from being bloated, inefficient, and disorganized, fewer younger and healthier people sign up for it, and more older, sicker people do. Premiums are set to rise once again.
Some lawmakers want to reform Obamacare to create a socialist universal health coverage program, while others want to repeal it outright. What would an alternative health care reform law look like?
Breitbart reported on one plan. Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republicans, are pushing a plan that would provide a universal tax credit for health insurance coverage and increase competition in the insurance market. An excerpt (emphasis added):
The Sessions-Cassidy plan is based on the work of John C. Goodman, president of the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research.
Goodman explained that a great deal of the Affordable Care Act’s unwieldy bureaucracy, expensive subsidies, and perverse incentives would be erased by the introduction of a $2,500 tax credit for each adult to purchase insurance, along with the removal of the restrictions and mandates currently forcing ObamaCare premiums into the stratosphere.
This would create powerful incentives for insurance companies to offer competitive products pitched at the $2,500 price point, allowing customers to buy insurance with minimal out-of-pocket expense. The tax credit would be vastly easier to administer than ObamaCare’s labyrinthine mandates, and far more effective at extending coverage to the uninsured, whose numbers remain far higher than the Affordable Care Act’s designers predicted.
The Goodman Institute predicted that under the alternative, 90 percent of the presently uninsured would be insured. Unclaimed tax credits would go toward paying to cover the “hard-core uninsured,” and the plan would shift insurance companies’ perspectives on sicker customers.
In the Sessions-Cassidy proposal, “health status risk adjustments” are employed to make “sick enrollees as desirable as healthy enrollees,” without the Affordable Care Act’s combination of mandates and subsidies. In essence, each enrollee is covered by a separate insurance policy to cover the cost of major changes in health status – i.e. developing a serious, costly medical condition.
Obamacare’s detractors warned of the expense and the disincentives, but Democrats pushed it through. The individual mandate is perhaps the most controversial part of the legislation. The president’s signature law doesn’t bode well for his legacy, and he knows it. He vetoed Congress’s attempt to repeal his law.
