Republicans campaigned for roughly a decade, promising voters they would dismantle former President Barack Obama’s landmark health care legislation; but one of their own senators is trying to keep it alive through the 2018 election cycle.
At the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, senators took testimony regarding whether to impose additional taxes and regulations for independent health care providers that aim to provide more affordable care than their hospital counterparts.
If conservatives don’t coalesce behind something soon, they will find themselves bystanders as their GOP colleagues link arms with Democrats to preserve and enlarge Obamacare, not to repeal and replace it.
The nation’s governors and state lawmakers should use every legal means available to them to fix their broken health insurance markets and thus reduce the punishing costs Obamacare is imposing on the residents of their states.
Sen. Claire Ayer and Rep. William Lippert do not want young healthy to drop their insurance. They are seriously considering shutting off this exit ramp for the young and healthy by creating a Vermont individual mandate to buy state-approved insurance.
Many states are eager to reverse the damage from Obamacare in 2018, but in some cases, they will need help from Congress, leading health care experts say.
Medicaid is a program intended to help the sick, elderly, disabled and poor, but in Vermont, it is also being used to quietly pad politically friendly unions’ bank accounts.
About 8.8 million people signed up for 2018 health coverage on HealthCare.gov during this year’s open enrollment period ending Dec. 15, compared to 9.2 million sign-ups for 2017 coverage and 9.6 million for 2016 coverage.
Congressional repeal of Obamacare’s individual insurance mandate penalty is not tantamount to pressing the button on the doomsday machine.
“I have always supported the freedom to choose. I believe that the federal government should not force anyone to buy something they do not wish to buy in order to avoid being taxed,” Murkowski wrote in Alaska newspaper the Daily News-Miner.
The crucial rationale for the individual mandate was that somebody had to subsidize the premiums of older sicker people. That “somebody” was young healthy people who, faced with exorbitant premiums to pay for somebody else’s coverage, would logically walk away from the insurance market altogether.
The mandate was always more of a “nanny tax” than a way to raise government funding. Democrats included it in the law to force the young and healthy to buy into the government-run health exchanges so as to offset the high cost of the old and very sick.