GOP unveils plan to replace ObamaCare

[Geee]

The Hill:

House Republicans on Wednesday released their long-awaited replacement plan for ObamaCare, drawing a contrast with Democrats and setting off a new round of fighting over healthcare policy.

 

The plan repeals ObamaCare and includes a range of standard Republican policy ideas, such as providing a tax credit to help people afford coverage, making Medicare more market-based, and capping Medicaid payments.

 

However, the plan lacks many details that are crucial for understanding its effect on coverage and the federal budget, including dollar figures for the tax credit.

The Republican plan, spearheaded by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), envisions a simpler system than ObamaCare with limited financial assistance and federal spending on healthcare. It allows for less generous “catastrophic” health plans, as opposed to ObamaCare plans, which must cover an array of required elements.

 

“Increasing health coverage is a worthwhile goal, but the law has increased health care costs, reduced access to providers, and restricted patients’ ability to choose the coverage that best suits themselves and their families,” the plan states.

 

“In this plan, innovative, market-based, patient-centered solutions replace Obamacare’s one-size-fits-all, Washington-knows-best approach.”

[Geee]

A Big Step Toward Repealing and Replacing Obamacare

 

For six years, it has been abundantly clear that Americans want Obamacare to be repealed—but only if a well-conceived conservative alternative is positioned to take its place. That's why the recent release of the House GOP health care plan is a big deal. The new plan would of course repeal Obamacare. But it would also fix what the federal government had already broken even before the law was passed and made things so much worse.

 

The proposal pairs an Obamacare alternative with Medicaid reforms and the crucial Medicare reforms (amounting to a kind of "Medicare Advantage Plus") that Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republicans have long championed. As Ryan put it after the proposal's release, "The way I see it, if we don't like the direction the country is going in—and we do not—then we have an obligation to offer an alternative….And that's what this is." He called the plan not merely "a difference is policy" but "a difference in philosophy."

 

Like the Obamacare alternatives advanced by the 2017 Project, the Hudson Institute, Ed Gillespie, Tom Price, and Scott Walker, the House GOP plan would finally fix the tax inequality in health care—which favors job-based insurance over individually purchased insurance—by offering a simple, refundable, non-income-based tax credit to those who buy health insurance on their own. (Those who don't use their whole tax credit could put their savings in a health saving account.) Why should someone who has to buy health insurance on his own not get a tax break while his next-door-neighbor, who has job-based insurance, gets a tax break? Fixing this longstanding tax inequity, combined with repealing Obamacare, would allow the individual market—finally—to begin flourishing.

 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-big-step-toward-repealing-and-replacing-obamacare/article/2003078