What’s It Mean For Me?
American Health Care Act Part 2
After last week’s roll out of the replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act (2010) there have been many questions arising as to how it will impact different populations and at what cost? The proposed American Health Care Act is designed to revamp the current national healthcare plan by redesigning how things get paid for, at what level they get paid for and who is going to pay for it. With that being said, one thing is for sure, people, especially those who are in the lower income brackets, will no longer be able to afford health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that at least 23 Million Americans will lose their insurance over the next ten years. If those numbers weren’t alarming enough, the real stunning fact coming from the White House and their own report which puts that number closer to 26 million Americans who will not be able to have basic health insurance under the American Health Care Act. Take a moment and think about that…could you be one of the millions of Americans who could lose your health care?
How? How does this all come about under the proposed new plan? In essence, it comes down to how everything gets paid for and who is paying for it. Currently, the Affordable Care Act mandates that everyone carry health insurance, a good idea to have health insurance but not everyone is thrilled about being forced to buy it or face fines. The idea is that if everyone has to have insurance then the prices should stay lower making it more affordable. Subsidies from the government help those with lower incomes so they can now be covered thus reducing the burden on health care providers to care for people who can’t pay for insurance thus lower the overall cost of care…which would lower the cost of insurance…or so the idea goes. Even though millions of Americans have signed on and now have affordable health insurance for the first time, the benefit to the insurance companies hasn’t played out as planned and many have dropped out of the program causing plan costs to rise thus making insurance more difficult to keep for many. By dropping the mandate to maintain insurance, millions of healthy young people are projected to drop it thus driving premium costs up more and further affecting how the subsidies will work.
The restructuring efforts to reshape how to pay for health care under the proposed new plan has been the driving force in the dropping the mandate and altering the subsidies to those who need it. Under the current plan, those who need subsidies receive them based from their level of income. The closer to the poverty level the greater the subsidy, if an individual or family is at or below the federal poverty level then they are directed to local and state services to meet their needs (I’ll discuss this more in a moment). The subsidies under the Affordable Care Act will continue through 2020 when the new proposed American Health Care Act would kick in and then the sweeping changes would make health insurance affordability inaccessible for millions of low income families who depend upon subsidies. In place of those subsidies, the proposed new plan will have tax breaks depending on age rather than income. For a young adult, the proposed tax rebate is $2000 and for a person 60 years or older, the tax rebate is $4000. In researching for this article, currently an older, single, low income male adult ($20,000) gets close to $8,500 in subsidies to help him pay for health insurance, under the proposed new plan, he’ll receive less than half of that thus making health insurance impossible to attain.
Again, I just am looking to raise awareness of the effects of the proposed new plan and to paraphrase our President, healthcare is complicated. For unbiased information and research, the Kaiser Family Foundation website is a great source of information on the cause and effects of the proposed plan. And again, I encourage those of you who wish to dive deeper into this proposed plan to gain a deeper understanding of how this proposed legislation will impact you or your loved ones. As always, thanks for reading, take care of yourself and each other, remember, we’re all in this together.
Wm Reid
Best Home Care Services
325 N Eastern Ave
Connersville, IN 47331
765-827-9833
wmreid@bhcshealth.com