Last month, the Republican’s plan to overhaul the Affordable Care Act failed in congress, but that hasn’t stopped them or President Trump from continuing to attempt to dismantle the bill. The stakes continue to be high: last month, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that fourteen million people would become uninsured in 2018 with the passing of TrumpCare. That number looked even larger when put alongside the current number of uninsured people in the U.S., which is currently at twenty-seven million. This means that the number of uninsured would increase by more than half. That number goes up to twenty-four million in the next ten years, almost generating the same amount of uninsured Americans as there were before Obamacare.
What the Republicans fail to understand is that a key reason the ACA has been so effective in reducing the number of uninsured is largely due to the individual mandate, which required healthy people to purchase insurance to subsidize those with more complicated health issues. While Republicans may argue the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate, they will not be able to keep their promise to keep people insured if they kill the individual mandate.
Of course, the individual mandate doesn’t solve every problem of the U.S healthcare system. Another reason people will drop their healthcare is due to a likely raise in premiums, which not every person will be able to afford. According to Republicans, however, the reason that many will not be able to afford these premiums is because they will enthusiastically budget the new iPhone instead!
Jason Chaffetz’s argument, of course, is a fallacy. Even with the ACA, many people aren’t able to afford healthcare – and it’s not because they spend money on iPhones. Instead, many can’t afford it because it is plainly too expensive. The lack of affordability would not have been solved by Trumpcare, which would require “insurers to apply a 30 percent surcharge on premiums for people who enroll in insurance in the nongroup or small-group markets if they have been uninsured for more than 63 days within the past year.” TrumpCare may have failed in congress, but Republicans are still clinging to many of the same ideas.
While Obamacare’s goal was to get as many people insured as possible, it seems that Republican plans are looking to do the opposite. Charging those who are looking to get insurance thirty percent more, after not being covered for a lapse of time, creates a scenario in which people will be unable to afford insurance and will have to forgo it. A lapse in being covered can happen for many reasons, most likely financial. To punish someone for making such a tough budgetary decision, by creating an more difficult expenditure to cover, is effectively boxing people out of healthcare.
Furthermore, these thirty-percent surcharges would not be going to support the government funding portion of TrumpCare, but instead would be added bonuses in the Act for the insurance companies. Yes — the insurance companies keep these surcharges. They can increase the premiums of those lapsed by that thirty percent for the first year following the lapse in coverage. It is looking pretty obvious who will benefit from that.
While the Republican health bill’s continuous coverage clause was put in place to make sure people maintain their insurance continuously, it would have done little to give incentive to anyone looking to become insured, especially if they had to drop coverage due to financial hardship.
As Republicans in congress, as well as President Trump, still continue to push to repeal Obamacare, I hope those who find themselves in this situation, precariously stuck without health insurance, at least can find some comfort in the fact that their new iPhones can take amazing photos with little to no light.