The problems the Senate GOP healthcare bill aims to fix – rising premiums, destabilizing the insurance market and high deductibles – are the problems it just will not solve as it is designed and might make things even worse, according to a report in The Hill.
The plan will allow Americans to just wait until they get sick to buy insurance, experts say, because they are not mandated to have insurance and can just sign up for it once they truly need it – as the bill bars insurers from denying coverage for those with a preexisting condition.
Rodney Whitlock is a longtime Congressional healthcare staffer who now serves as an industry consultant. His tweets suggest the Senate healthcare bill might need to be amended to include a continuous coverage requirement and that is before the Congressional Budget Office delivers what may be a lot of bad news for the bill this coming week.
Abolishing the Obamacare coverage mandate and providing less subsidies to buy healthcare will do more than just insure less Americans, experts say, it will also make coverage for those who do have it more expensive.
"A combination of repealing the individual mandate and diminishing premium subsidies would tend to destabilize the market," Kaiser Family Foundation Larry Levitt told The Hill.
As an alternative to the Obamacare mandate, the Senate GOP bill might need to bolster insurer's leverage by requiring people with a gap in coverage to wait six months before their health benefits kick in, according to the report.
The bill does provide billions for a "stability fund" to help bring down costs for Americans in 2018 and 2019, but after that funding tapers off, the GOP health plan would cause serious problems by 2022, Levitt told The Hill.
Adding to the problem will be those who only choose low-cost insurance plans, which will amount to the catastrophic coverage plans with higher deductibles Obamacare created.
That problem, too, will not be fixed by the Senate GOP bill, experts say, especially if healthy Americans just do not bother to buy those high-deductible plans.
"Consumers might look at the benefit and say this is not good enough, and I don't want to buy it," Avalere Health president Dan Mendelson told The Hill.
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