Will Health Care Reform Be Repealed?

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.

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Why Health Care Reform Won’t Be Repealed

The Republican-sponsored “Repealing the Job Killing Health Care Law Act” will be voted on in the House next week. As explained in the last post, “Will Health Care Reform Be Repealed?,” this bill is intended to nullify the Affordable Care Act health care reform that became law last spring.

Many Americans, including those suffering from mesothelioma, are fed up with being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, or learning that they’ve exceeding coverage limits. Lifetime coverage limits already have been eliminated by the health care reform law, and beginning in 2014 insurers will no longer be able to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

In last year’s elections, many Republicans campaigned on repealing health care reform. But now that they are in control of the House, they are hearing from lobbyists that the health insurance industry does not want the Act repealed.

Last year, health insurers tried to derail passage of health care reform bill. But now that it’s become law, and the bean counters and number crunchers have analyzed its effects, they’ve come to realize something startling — the Act will be good for business. This is mostly because, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Act will allow 32 million Americans to receive health insurance who wouldn’t have it otherwise. And nearly all of those new policies will be written by private insurance companies.

This is not to say they love everything about health care reform. They have a lot of new regulations to deal with, such as the provision that large group plans must spend at least 85% of premium income on benefits, instead of on marketing, paperwork, or profits.

However, now that it’s dawned on the insurance executives that they’re going to get millions of new customers, they aren’t so worried about the regulations. Reporting for The Politico, Sarah Kliff finds insurance companies eagerly preparing for expansion and exploring all the ways they can capitalize in the new health insurance landscape. Sounds like the law might grow some jobs, not kill jobs.

In fact, the one thing that most worries the insurance CEOs is that Congress will leave most of the health care reform bill intact but remove the individual mandate. Without the individual mandate, the health reform law really would be a disaster for insurance companies.

The mandate that everyone must acquire health insurance goes into effect in 2014, and it’s probably the most controversial part of the bill if you exclude the non-existent “death panels.” Many politicians have called the mandate unconstitutional and have sworn to repeal it if they can’t repeal the entire law.

Joseph M. Zubretsky, CEO of Aetna, explained that without the mandate, insurers won’t be able to offer affordable insurance. “The unintended consequence of repealing and replacing part of the legislation is the biggest risk here,” he said. “If guaranteed issue stays but the enforceable mandate disappears, you need another mechanism to make the costs in the risk pool work.”

“Guaranteed issue” is the provision that insurers can no longer refuse to insure someone because of pre-existing conditions. This part of the law also will go into effect in 2014 for everyone. Very simply, without the mandate, young and healthy people will put off buying insurance until they have major medical expenses. And then the insurers’ business model flies out the window.

Zubretsky of Aetna says his company has been talking to Republicans on this issue, and he said he believes they understand the “consequences” of repealing the health care reform bill, in whole or in part.

Those Republican lawmakers probably will put on a good show of trying to repeal health care reform for the folks back home. But with the insurance industry telling them to back off, they won’t try very hard.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2011 at 1:38 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.

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