New ACA Plans Trump Pitched Could Increase Deductibles By $31K
President Donald Trump and the GOP have long railed against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without providing any meaningful solutions of their own. Last year, Republicans in Congress allowed pandemic-era ACA subsidies to expire, which greatly increased the price of health insurance for millions of Americans. The Department of Health and Human Services seems to have come up with a bold, new solution: cheaper plans that provide worse insurance.
According to the New York Times, the plans would appear to be cheaper on paper by lowering monthly premiums. The catch is that it would put users of those plans on the hook for thousands of dollars in medical expenses before the plans kick in. The Trump administration has few options to lower ACA costs without congressional approval.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the ACA, has spoken favorably of the proposed plans. “The goal is simple: lower costs, more choice, and exchanges that work as intended,” he said.
From the New York Times:
Dr. Oz’s new proposal would allow one kind of health plan to raise the annual deductible to more than $15,000 for an individual and $31,000 for a family; those are much higher than current Obamacare plans. The individual deductible would be eight times the average for someone with job-based insurance.
Many policy experts expressed doubt that the administration’s proposal would reduce the high cost of health care. “Nobody wants that product,” said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard health economist who has studied high-deductible plans. “It’s going to be a really cheap product that nobody wants.”
The proposal involves a type of plan known as a catastrophic or skinny policies. While they may be appropriate for someone who is young and healthy, a sudden emergency room visit or unexpected hospital stay could cost thousands of dollars in unforeseen bills. People with chronic medical conditions also might have to pay for much — if not all — of their care out of their own pockets.
Dr. Joseph R. Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund, which finances health care research, told the Times that the proposed plans may only exacerbate the issue of unaffordable health insurance. “There’s no doubt that we have an affordability crisis,” he said. “As we move forward to shifting more of the burden to patients, there’s a chance to really exacerbate the crisis.”
One of the key arguments made by the Trump administration is that offering plans that don’t come with a set network of doctors or hospitals allows consumers to find hospitals and doctors that align with their budgets. Yet that argument reveals that the Trump administration isn’t considering one key issue: time.
People have families to take care of, and it’s becoming increasingly common for them to work multiple jobs to keep up with the rising cost of living. It was already a headache trying to research the ACA plans I could afford without subsidies. Now you’re asking people to not only research the plans but also the doctors, hospitals, and prescriptions they can use with the plans, with no guarantee that the insurance will be accepted by any of the doctors in their area.
As one of the millions who had to go from a silver to a bronze plan due to the expiring subsidies, I can tell you firsthand that they provide little more than the bare minimum. Offering plans that provide even less just sounds like an attempt to take people’s money and offer little in return.
“We’re normalizing hardship, and we’re normalizing catastrophe,” Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told the Times. She added that the new rule “is not trying to make something comparable to employer coverage,” she said.
The way both Trump and congressional Republicans have handled the ACA can only be described as disastrous. As a result of the ACA subsidies expiring, millions of Americans chose to go without insurance this year because they could not afford it. Instead of meaningfully addressing those costs, the Republican solution is to ask those people to pay for insurance that effectively gives them nothing.
Somehow, this is worse than doing nothing at all.
SEE ALSO: