Republicans Want You to Pay More for Healthcare
Instead of renewing subsidies for people on Obamacare insurance plans, Republicans want them to give them a savings account while jacking up their costs.
Republicans finally settled on a healthcare plan this week, as an alternative to renewing subsidies that help over 20 million people buy insurance. Their plan? Moving people to low-quality, high-cost plans, with a savings account to help them pay for some, certainly not all, of the additional healthcare costs they will incur if they need healthcare.
The bill from Senate Republicans is the latest iteration of the GOP’s same old plan to replace Obamacare, which is not much of a plan: The idea is that people pay more for healthcare, or forgo necessary care. Republicans are offering this vision again now as the Senate prepares to vote Thursday on whether to allow Obamacare subsidies to expire at the end of the month. Once the subsidies expire, millions of people will pay higher premiums or go uninsured.
The Republican plan would allow for the Obamacare subsidies to expire, and instead give people $1,000 or $1,500 in health savings accounts. Enrollees would not be able to use the savings accounts to pay their insurance premiums – and they would only get the savings accounts if they sign up for low-tier coverage with exceedingly high deductibles.
“Sicker people would certainly be worse off under this plan,” Larry Levitt, an executive vice president for health policy at KFF, tells Zeteo.
Republicans’ effort to raise healthcare costs for millions of people comes as polls show Donald Trump’s approval ratings are already in the toilet. A brutal US economy – the issue that delivered Trump the presidency – is the same issue dragging his numbers down now. Yet, both he and Republicans seem committed to making Americans spend more money on healthcare that they don’t have.
Apart from the Obamacare subsidy debate, Republicans have already voted to throw millions of people off Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans, as part of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
One way or another, more pain is on the way. The only question is how much.
The damage is already mounting: By now, Americans on Obamacare plans have received notices that their costs are about to go way up. The deadline to sign up for a plan on the marketplace, for coverage that starts in January, is Dec. 15 – meaning that Congress has exceedingly little time left to extend the subsidies.
Instead of supporting Democrats’ measure to extend the subsidies for three years, or a shorter-term extension, Senate Republicans are rallying behind a bill from GOP Senators Mike Crapo and Bill Cassidy that would allow the Obamacare subsidies to expire and Americans’ costs to spike.
Senate Republicans are expected to hold a vote on the legislation Thursday, alongside the vote on the Obamacare subsidy extension.
In lieu of the subsidies, the Crapo-Cassidy bill would provide people with $1,000 or $1,500 in health savings accounts. It is essential to note that people would not be allowed to use these accounts to help pay their skyrocketing premiums, so many Americans on these plans would still have to absorb significant cost increases to stay insured.
Additionally, the health savings accounts would only be available to people who sign up for Bronze-tier or catastrophic health insurance plans. That means Republicans are deliberately pushing people into lower-quality plans that have high deductibles and leave people saddled with higher out-of-pocket costs.
Cassidy and Crapo are selling their healthcare bill with B.S. about how it would “give money directly to families to control their own care.”
This lie echoes the spin we keep hearing from Trump. Asked in a Politico interview on Monday whether he’ll allow the Obamacare subsidies to expire, Trump said, “I’d like to have people buy their own healthcare, get much better healthcare ... I want to give the money to the people, not to the insurance companies.” He claimed this would work “like magic.”
Healthcare costs are far higher in the United States than in other countries. The idea that people will be able to get better healthcare with lower-quality insurance, or without insurance, is insanity.
The Crapo-Cassidy bill is unlikely to win support from Democrats, and it seems to have been written to ensure that outcome. The legislation contains two culture-war poison bills: In addition to its built-in cost increases, the bill would bar the health savings accounts from being spent on abortion, and it would prohibit individual health insurance plans from covering gender transition services.
As Trump tries to decide whether to tell voters he’s doing a great job on “affordability,” or that the word “affordability” is actually a “con job” from Democrats, he and his party appear ready and eager to allow the Obamacare subsidies to expire – which will make healthcare even more unaffordable for millions of people.
Have a tip for Andrew? Send via Signal to aperez.03.
Check out more from Zeteo:
