Americans have just avoided another health care disaster in voting down the Senate’s ‘skinny’ Obamacare Repeal and Replace bill. Even though maintaining most of the taxes to pay for the Medicaid portion, it would have made insurance coverage prohibitively expensive for those older and sicker users with the removal of the private and employer mandate requirements that would cause younger and healthier people to leave the insurance markets.
This is really just the latest precipice that’s been avoided. Americans already have the worst health outcomes in the developed world, precisely because America is the only developed country—in fact, even of undeveloped countries—that doesn’t have universal coverage.
The result is one of the highest birth death rates, as well as diabetes, heart and other infectious disease rates—which are diseases usually associated with poorer, undeveloped countries and regions.
Why has this happened in America? Because America has the worst income inequality in the developed world, according to the CIA World Factbook. And studies have shown that those countries with the most inequality also rank lowest in healthcare benefits.
And the U.S. is in 106th place of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook; with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality rankings, Germany and France are 12th and 20th, respectively, as I’ve highlighted in past columns. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.
This is while congress has been attempting to take away Medicaid benefits for the poor, elderly and infirm? It doesn’t compute. Just 3 Senators—Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and John McCain—were courageous enough to stand up to the conservative lobbies that would only worsen healthcare outcomes.
What if conservatives succeeded in repealing Obamacare? “Republicans' Obamacare repeal bill would leave 17 million more people uninsured next year, and 32 million more in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate Wednesday. It also said premiums would double by 2026. …By 2026, three quarters of the population would live in areas with no insurers participating in the non-group market, due to upward pressure on premiums and downward pressure on enrollment, the report found.”
On the other hand, a 2016 Commonwealth Club study lists Obamacare’s benefits. “…evidence indicates that the ACA has likely acted as an economic stimulus, in part by freeing up private and public resources for investment in jobs and production capacity. Moreover, the law’s payment and other cost-related reforms appear to have contributed to the marked slowdown in health spending growth seen in recent years.”
Some of those benefits are:
· Health care spending growth per person—both public and private—has slowed for five years.
· A number of ACA reforms, particularly related to Medicare, have likely contributed to the slowdown in health care spending growth by tightening provider payment rates and introducing incentives to reduce excess costs.
· Faster-than-expected economic growth and slower-than-expected health care spending have led to multiple downward revisions of the federal deficit and projected deficits.
· These trends have also been a boon to state and local government budgets, as job growth has improved state tax revenues while cost growth in health care programs has slowed. At the same time, expanding insurance to millions of people who were previously uninsured has supported local health systems and enhanced families’ ability to pay for necessities, including health care.
· The accrued savings in health care spending relative to their projected growth prior to the ACA are substantial: Medicare alone is now projected to spend $1 trillion less between 2010 and 2020.
The lobbies behind the Obamacare repeal effort have not succeeded in making more Americans ill. I don’t even want to imagine what that percentage would be of the 32 million would ultimately lose their coverage.
So now is the time, in Senator McCain’s words, for Republicans and Democrats to work together in “regular order” to craft a bipartisan bill.
Harlan Green © 2017
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