“Nearly 18 percent of America’s economy is devoted to spending on health care, far more than the share in any comparable country. And although the U.S. medical system provides some of the best health care in the world, it does so only for those who can afford it. Moreover, fragmented service delivery undercuts overall quality. A decade after passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health care spending is still eating up government and household budgets, nearly 28 million Americans remain uninsured, and costs continue bounding upward.”
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“Too many of today’s policy “solutions” build upon the faulty insurance company model that currently organizes U.S. health care—a model that was concocted by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the 1930s as a way to protect the professional status and earning power of its members. It resulted in care that is expensive, bureaucratic, and frustrating for both patients and caregivers.”
“The bad news for people with preexisting conditions is that this “ironclad pledge” is a lie. Trump and his administration have fought hard — in all three branches of government — to strip people with preexisting health conditions of the protections they enjoy under the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, if Trump has his way, those protections will cease to exist.”
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” In 2018, for example, it handed down a rule expanding the use of short term insurance plans to that do not cover many services, and that may exclude people with preexisting conditions.
The mere existence of these plans can drive up premiums for people with expensive preexisting conditions, because these skimpy plans will lure healthy consumers away from more generous plans.”
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“In Congress, meanwhile, Trump supported legislation seeking to repeal Obamacare or drastically water down its protections. One bill backed by Trump, the American Health Care Act, would have allowed many insurers to charge higher premiums — potentially prohibitively high premiums — to patients with preexisting conditions.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is currently asking the courts to repeal Obamacare almost in its entirety. If the courts ultimately embrace the administration’s position, that will mean that all of Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions will be struck down.”
““The four leading candidates would all spend money to expand coverage and they would all raise taxes to help cover the costs,” Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget senior vice president Marc Goldwein said in an interview Friday. “We estimate only one candidate would actually raise enough to assure their plan doesn’t add to the national debt.”
With the higher price tags come lower out-of-pocket costs for millions of Americans under the Warren and Sanders plans.”