Senate’s bill hazardous to health of Floridians
So Sen. Marco Rubio is hedging on the finally unveiled Senate health-care bill, saying he first needs to huddle with state Republican leaders. He also wants to talk to health-care providers, insurers and patient advocates. A good idea. Why couldn’t the rest of his fellow Republicans in the Senate have thought of that before writing such a heartless bill?
What Rubio is likely to hear is widespread loathing for what the GOP senators have hatched in their seclusion: a plan that gives a huge tax break to the wealthiest Americans while taking away coverage for millions, making huge cuts in Medicaid and allowing insurance companies to jack up rates for older people.
Sen. Bill Nelson, who stands with other Democrats in opposing this hot mess, had it right when he said, “Now we know why they tried to keep it secret.”
Here’s another secret: The premise for this whole exercise of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare is a sham. Obamacare is not failing — certainly not in Florida, the state with the largest number of signups on the federal marketplace.
Six insurance companies intend to return to the Affordable Care Acts’s individual marketplace in 2018; a total of nine insurers filed rates compliant with the health law, on or off the exchange, Palm Beach Post staff writer Charles Elmore reports.
And for 90 percent of the state’s approximately 1.5 million marketplace customers, rates averaging $84 a month are barely rising, thanks to government subsidies.
What can tip Obamacare into collapse isn’t any inevitable weaknesses, but President Donald Trump’s continuing threats to withhold said subsidies. Insurance companies hate uncertainty, and if Trump ends the estimated $10 billion annual supports, he’ll be responsible for the “destabilization of the marketplace and the deliberate sabotage of our neighbors’ health and financial well-being,” as Florida’s Democratic congressional members have written.
The Senate plan would keep these payments going through 2019, then start shrinking them in 2020 — cynically delaying their demise for a couple of election cycles to give cowering senators cover from otherwise-angered constituents.
The Senate bill also lets insurers charge older people (aged 50 to 64) five times what they can charge younger people, up from three times in the current law. That holds terrible implications for Florida, the state with the highest percentage of senior citizens.
The plan takes harmful aim at people on Medicaid, and there are more than 4.3 million of them in Florida, despite the state’s refusal to expand the rolls when Obamacare offered the opportunity. They’re not just the poor. They’re children, people with disabilities and more than half of the people in our nursing homes. Both the House and Senate bills would cut back drastically on federal funding.
The Senate plan eliminates Obamacare’s individual mandate, which many Americans will see as a good thing. But by killing the incentive for healthy people to buy health insurance, insurers will have no choice but to drive up premiums and deductibles for the older, less healthy people with the greater need to buy coverage.
When the GOP gets done wrecking Obamacare, what will happen? Just as before the law took effect, people with little means will show up in emergency rooms when they are in serious straits. And who will pay for this? All of us who are capable of paying our bills, after hospitals pass on the cost to us.
We don’t have a Congressional Budget Office score yet. We do know that the House bill, which even President Trump now calls “mean,” would force 23 million people to lose their health insurance, the CBO calculated.
That bill has an insanely low 16 percent approval rating, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. It’s hard to imagine the Senate bill’s numbers looking much better than that. Ironically, that poll also shows that Obamacare is far more popular: 41 percent of Americans say the ACA is a good idea, against 38 percent opposed.
As we’ve said before, Obamacare is far from perfect. But its flaws should be corrected by an honest, bipartisan effort to deliver better health care at a better cost to more Americans — not this.