Joe K III: U.S. must keep Obamacare individual mandate
U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program Friday to discuss Senate Republicans’ controversial plan to include a repeal of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate in their sweeping tax reform bill.
Q: I don’t understand how 13 million people are going to end up uninsured. How is that possible?
A: The way that it essentially works is there’s an incentive put in place under the Affordable Care Act that incentivizes signing up for the exchanges, and there’s a tax penalty put in place if you don’t. It’s similar to what happens here in Massachusetts. That is called the individual mandate.
Q: This allows me if I want to continue or I can just say, “I’m sick of this. I was angry in the first place that I had to sign up.” Right?
A: What the Affordable Care Act does is try to recognize there are certain protections out there that we needed to have in the insurance markets that we didn’t have before . ... The individual mandate was a product of a conservative think tank, because what they said is, “Look, if I go out and I get hit by a bus, I’m going to get rushed into an emergency room and I’m going to get care and if I don’t have insurance ... I’m never going to be able to pay for that $50,000 bill.” So what the mandate actually did, the intent behind it, was to actually stop that freewriting, to stop people from saying, “Hey, I can take a risk on this because if I do need emergency services, I’m going to be able to get the care I need and I won’t end up paying for it.” You might have to declare bankruptcy, but even if that happens the hospital is going to have to pay some, other health care providers are going to have to pay some, other folks, taxpayers, are going to have to pay some, and that was the way the whole health care market was subsidized . ... This is a system that we know every single one of us is going to draw on at some point, whether it’s welcoming a new child into the world or watching a loved one pass through it. We all have to have skin in the game, we all have to pay into it because we’re all going to get something out of it as well.
Q: But it’s their decision. That’s a big difference, isn’t it? They’re not losing if they decide.
A: Aside from the rest of us who also then lose, right? And that’s the issue that I think is at the root of these health care debates . ... If you want to try to make the system work for everybody, everybody has to pay into it. You can’t go back to a system where people get to pick and choose whether they’re going to benefit from the health care system that we have and then pass the cost on to somebody else.