The 112th Congress of the United States is now in session, with a Republican majority in the House and a very slim Democratic majority in the Senate. And one of the first items on the agenda of many legislators is repealing last year’s Affordable Care Act, also known as the health care reform bill.
A bill titled “Repealing the Job Killing Health Care Law Act” — seriously — was scheduled to be voted on by the House this week, but the vote now has been postponed until next week. This very brief bill does one thing only, which is cancel every provision of the Affordable Care Act that became law last year.
So does that mean all the seniors who received rebate checks to help cover prescription drug costs in the Medicare Part D “gap” would have to return the money? Yes, apparently so. Further, the new 50% discount on brand-name prescriptions filled in the gap would be yanked away. Medicare co-pays for checkups and preventive services, which were eliminated by last year’s act, would return.
Many provisions of the Affordable Care Act won’t go into effect until 2014. These includes the requirement that insurers cannot refuse to insure adults with pre-existing conditions. Nearly all of us have “pre-existing conditions” by the time we reach 50, of course. Our chances of being “pre-conditioned” go up as we age – mesothelioma, for example, is rarely diagnosed in patients younger than 50.
But a provision that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions already is in effect. The Republican bill would cancel that.
Thanks to health care reform, young adults can remain on their parents’ employee health benefits until they are 26. According to Marisa Schultz of the Detroit News, in Michigan alone 32,800 young adults now on their parents’ health care plans would lose that coverage.
To the surprise of nay-sayers, tax breaks created by the Affordable Care Act have allowed many small businesses to offer health benefits to employees for the first time. Noam N. Levey writes in the Los Angeles Times that insurance companies have seen a significant increase in customers who work for small businesses. Repeal health care reform, and hundreds of thousands of working people would lose those new benefits.
The Congressional Budget Office figures that repealing health care reform would add $230 billion to the deficit and result in 32 million fewer people having health insurance by 2021. Such a deal.
Washington watchers say it is highly unlikely the repeal bill will ever become law, if only because the Senate would not approve it and the President would certainly veto it. But since so many House Republicans ran on a promise of repealing “Obamacare,” the repeal effort will go forward anyway.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
No comments:
Post a Comment