The Republican Way of Fixing Obamacare
The Republican presidential candidates have been criticizing Obamacare over and over again, but now it looks like they are going to step away from talking and start acting. One of the people who decided to go specific on the matter was Scott Walker, Wisconsin Gov., who released a plan last week about how he would replace the current Affordable Care Act.
Reactions to this new act has proven that the Republicans need to explain as to how they believe it could be any better and they will have to take a lot of heat for it too. So let’s start with the beginning: people with pre-existing conditions. How do we help them? It is common knowledge that insurers charge customers who have any kind of chronic health conditions more than they should. On top of that, they don’t offer them any coverage whatsoever.
While Obamacare just eliminates this possibility, Republicans want to both protect people and giving health-insurance markets a little more free space. Fine, let’s say we agree to that, and we also ignore the fact that customers might not have the best time of their lives, but how do we do it to please everybody then?
If insurers cannot tell the difference between a sick person and a healthy one, people can just move on without an insurance until they really get sick, then they would sign up. But if all the people were to have this approach and only sick people would have insurance, the prices would explode. Obamacare simply pairs the lack of discrimination with the mandate which demands that people buy insurance.
Republicans obviously want something different, but if they want to get the Obamacare deal out of the way, they just need something different, something that will work better than it. And this is what Walker is trying to do. His plan has three great benefits for people with pre-existing conditions.
First of all, we are talking of the introduction of tax credits for people, in case their employer does not provide coverage. Then there is the obligation for insurers to treat sick and healthy people equally, offering the same terms as long as the kept themselves covered. For anybody who was not included in the “plan” at all, there are high-risk pools.
The plan might just work, although we are very far from the actual moment of truth. There are some opposing parties who argue that this system was adopted before, but it did not work. The example of 1996 was given, when a resembling program was applied, but people with pre-conditions still faced major difficulties in getting their insurances. Still, it remains to be seen if this plan is going to be “the plan” for America in the following years.
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