...legislators would have to get their health care coverage from ACA exchanges like other Americans, and the individual mandate would be pushed back one year. (Remember, the corporate mandate has been pushed backed, it’s only individuals being forced to buy or pay a fine.)If the Republican Bill were to Pass…
Who is on the wrong side here? The exchanges would still open, those who would benefit from the ACA could still buy insurance and legislators would have the same experience as Americans instead of gold-plated healthcare.
Ian Welsh
Well obviously killing or delaying the individual mandate is a tactic for killing the ACA. Without the mandate, the healthiest, youngest and lowest-risk Americans would be able to opt out of the system, dramatically raising premiums on everyone else and turning ACA into an economic and political disaster, a disaster Republicans would then run on in 2014.
ReplyDeleteThe intended effect of these tactics is the same as a proposal to give a full education tax rebate to everyone other than people who have kids in the public schools. Everybody knows that the whole point of such proposals would be to kill public education, as well as to shift the burden of educating our children from society as a whole to parents as a group, and ultimately to individual households.
dan, would a one year extension really kill the ACA? what would be the actual results -- in terms of numbers opting out and the additional costs incurred?
ReplyDeleteit's not at all clear to me that this is the case (not saying i think it's not, it's just that i don't know of any good evidence one way or the other).
p.s. disagree with your analogy, but that's a separate issue.
"Well obviously killing or delaying the individual mandate is a tactic for killing the ACA. Without the mandate, the healthiest, youngest and lowest-risk Americans would be able to opt out of the system, dramatically raising premiums on everyone else and turning ACA into an economic and political disaster, a disaster Republicans would then run on in 2014."
ReplyDeleteI don't see why delaying the individual mandate for 1 year to match the 1 year delay given to big business would kill ACA. However, I do agree with you Dan that it would give Republicans a 2014 mid-term election issue to rally around which is why President Obama will stridently oppose compromising on this issue.
"The intended effect of these tactics is the same as a proposal to give a full education tax rebate to everyone other than people who have kids in the public schools. Everybody knows that the whole point of such proposals would be to kill public education, as well as to shift the burden of educating our children from society as a whole to parents as a group, and ultimately to individual households."
Kill public education? I thought it was already dead.
All seriousness aside there is a long list of special interests getting waivers, exemptions and exceptions from ACA, but I think the one I love the most is the The National Treasury Employees Union, (NTEU), which represents the IRS employees and has come out against the proposal to put federal workers into exchange-based health insurance.
So unless I misunderstand, the people in charge of deciding whether you go into an exchange, and who decided it doesn’t matter whether your state doesn’t want one, don’t want to be in one themselves. Not sure, but I reckon the 17,000 IRS agents hired to help enforce ACA will also get this exemption.
Selise, I can't predict. But I would assume that insurance company premiums for the new exchange policies are based on estimates of revenues from those policy premiums along with payouts to the people covered. If they then learn that many of the young and healthy people will not be signing up for a year, then the price for everyone else goes up. That's the whole purpose of the mandate - to spread the costs via a combination of
ReplyDeleteIn any case, the right-wing Republican strategy is clearly to kill, mutilate or undermine the ACA. The fact that they are talking about a one-year delay on the mandate means that they are trying to engineer some kind of bad news for ACA that they can use as an election issue next fall.