BETSY McCAUGHEY, PHD : ANOTHER OBAMACARE LIE- PROTECTING THOSE WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/another-obamacare-lie-protecting-those-with-pre-existing-condition?f=puball
The Affordable Care Act gets curioser and curioser. President Obama promised to protect people with pre-existing conditions and help the uninsured.
Yet these vulnerable groups are getting clobbered. Congress needs to act to protect them and not wait until the entire misadventure plays out.
Here’s a plan of action:
The people most threatened by ObamaCare have pre-existing conditions, meaning health problems that make it hard to get insurance. To sell ObamaCare, the president actually lied, claiming he would protect these people.
He even lied that his mother, Anne Dunham, a cancer victim, suffered because her insurer used the pre-existing condition excuse to drop her. The truth, revealed in a 2011 biography, is she had employer-provided insurance which paid her hospital bills until the end of her life.
Since 1996, employer-provided plans have been barred from dropping or excluding anyone based on a pre-existing condition. Nor does Medicare or Medicaid.
The pre-existing conditions problem affects about 2 million people in the individual market. The best options for these sick people are being closed because of ObamaCare.
In 35 states, they currently get coverage through high-risk pools, where premiums are subsidized to help keep them within reach. Most of these pools have long waiting lists.
But high-risk pools must close on Dec. 31, 2013, or shortly after, because the Affordable Care Act directs ill patients to enroll in ObamaCare exchange plans.
The problem is, most exchange plans severely limit their choice of hospitals and doctors, excluding academic hospitals and specialty cancer centers. State insurance commissioners are scrambling to delay closing the high-risk pools.
The high-risk pools are an honest way to subsidize care for the sick, and they’ve worked for twenty-five years. ObamaCare replaces them with a devious method – luring young, healthy people into exchange plans at premiums far higher than their own cost of care to offset the cost of the sick in the same pool. Exchange plans are a rip-off for the young and a dangerous downgrade for the sick.
The uninsured – the group the president claimed his law was enacted to help – also are left out in the cold. According to the Congressional Budget Office and the American Enterprise Institute, at least half of those who lose coverage gain it again within 12 months, generally because of a new job.
A temporary problem needs a temporary fix.
People who are between jobs need temporary help paying what are known as COBRA premiums, to maintain their on-the-job health insurance.
In 2009, Congress enacted a federal subsidy that paid 65% of COBRA for nine months, eventually extending it to 18 months. According to a U.S. Treasury analysis, that increased COBRA participation by almost 50%. A heftier subsidy (85%) for a shorter period would likely yield bigger results.
Unfortunately, ObamaCare replaces this sensible fix with a grossly inferior one: Medicaid. If you lose your income, the exchanges automatically dump you into Medicaid. That means losing private coverage and access to your doctors.
As bitterly divided as Republicans and Democrats in Congress are, they should be able to find common ground on these sensible fixes – maintaining high-risk pools and a COBRA subsidy. That will ease the pain as they wrangle over the future of the law.
COBRA cost $2 billion in 2009, about $2,000 per recipient. Funding the high-risk pools would cost $22 billion a year ($11,000 per enrollee, according to the national association of these pools). That’s less than the $26 billion budgeted for the unpopular and still empty exchanges in 2014.
Here’s another piece of damage control: Unless Congress acts, starting Jan. 1, 2014, group health plans must provide a costly one-size-fits-all benefit package defined by Washington. Employers are expected to start dropping coverage, leaving millions to be dumped into Medicaid or Medicaid-like exchange plans.
Of course, hardest hit will be those with pre-existing conditions – the people the president vowed to protect. Without high-risk pools, where will they go? Down a rabbit hole?
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and the author of “Beating Obamacare.” Her website is here: http://betsymccaughey.com/
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/another-obamacare-lie-protecting-those-with-pre-existing-condition?f=puball#ixzz2nAHiIXzW
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