Three Senate Republicans have announced their plan to amend the Affordable Care Act if the Supreme Court decides it should be construed as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell have proposed:
irst and most important: We would provide financial assistance to help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period. It would be unfair to allow families to lose their coverage, particularly in the middle of the year.
Most of these people have gone through the wringer to get this insurance. Millions lost their previous health-care plans because those plans didn’t meet Obamacare’s requirements; others no longer have access to the doctors or hospitals they were accustomed to; millions spent weeks trying to purchase insurance on the flawed Web site rolled out by the administration; and many have seen their out-of-pocket health costs or premiums skyrocket.
People do not deserve further disruption from this law.
Second, we will give states the freedom and flexibility to create better, more competitive health insurance markets offering more options and different choices. Republicans understand that what works in Utah is different from what works in Tennessee or Wyoming. We want to give states the time and flexibility to design health-care systems that work for them, not for the bureaucrats in Washington.
I presume that means that the Obama Administration’s power to determine what is acceptable healthcare insurance and what isn’t would be at an end.
I really have no strong feeling about their plan one way or another other than that it’s a patch on a patch. I don’t see that it fixes much and it leaves us just as much in need of healthcare reform as we have been for the last six years with even slimmer prospects for getting any.
I guess most people, including Congress, fail to realize that the states have largely been in charge of health insurance, aside from Medicare. If they had solutions to offer I suspect they would have done so in the past. Most states have never made much of an attempt to address the issue. Instead, the large majority of states have just one to three large insurance providers. Private insurance costs have grown as fast or faster than Medicare, and they have never come close to providing universal access.
Steve
About the only positive I can see is that the GoP is beginning to move beyond the absolutist “repeal” rhetoric. Not that that is saying much.