This will be short and sweet, consider it a Health Care Open Thread.
‘Repeal and Replace’ is a pipe dream. Because all the good parts of ACA including guaranteed issue, coverage of pre-existing conditions and inclusions of young people on their parents’ policy actually cost money. At least up front. Which has to come from somewhere. And that ‘where’ tends to come from the pockets of Republican leaning constituencies including medical equipment manufacturers, insurance companies, and medical providers generally. For example a huge part of projected ACA savings comes from reduction of payments for Medicare Advantage, originally billed as a way to leverage the ‘efficiency’ of private (and profit making) economic entities to public ones. Which efficiency calculation has proved problematic even before you calculate the ‘profit’ thingee. With the result that Medicare reimburses Medicare Advantage providing insurance companies with a 14% surcharge over traditional Medicare. Or I should say “reimbursed”, because most of the much ballyhooed “cuts” to Medicare trumpeted by Republicans have come from elimination of the surcharge. Itself rather problematic given that there seems to be no evidence of actual “efficiencies” in MA.
Republicans have no answer for this dilemna. Just about every specific item they oppose about ACA serves as an offset to the increased costs of guaranteed issue and coverage of pre-exisitng conditions. Including their so-called ‘death panels’ which after all are simply cost-benefit analyses of current provision of medical care. Or the same thing that private corporations spend millions on hiring consultants to address. Because when it comes right down to it ‘efficiency’ in the private corporative sense boils down to cost controls.
As a result Republicans are flailing. Their ‘solutions’ such as they are, including cross state border insurance sales and tort reform do little to nothing to having negative consequences on the actual provision of medical care to end-users (aka ‘patients’) but instead reduce burdens on insurance company and provider bottom lines. The same for repeal of the medical device tax and employer mandates and individual mandates. All increase cost while providing bubkis on the ‘available’ and ‘affordable’ fronts.
Those of us who followed health care reform on a daily basis back in 2009 saw that it was at times the rawest form of legislative sausage making. In order to enjoy the nice juiciness of the Bratwurst of Affordable Health Care you had to stomach the knowledge of the nasty bits that actually saved money on the price of the resulting Sausage Dog. And Republicans have no recipe to provide that same Red Hot that doesn’t decrease the quality or increase the sawdust component.
Hoisted by their own Weinar, err Petard.