Thursday, March 9, 2017

Rand Paul Let's It Rip: All the Things Wrong in the New Healthcare Proposal

Rand Paul meeting with Matthew Boyle in Rand's Senate office

Rand Paul sat down yesterday with Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle to discuss the problems with the new proposed healthcare plan that President Trump is pushing:
I think the reason why the House leadership bill is Obamacare Lite is because it retains subsidies. 
Obamacare had subsidies for people to buy insurance. In the Paul Ryan bill, they keep the subsidies—they just call them refundable tax credits.
 Some people are predicting that it’s actually going to be more expensive than the subsidies we have under Obamacare.
This isn’t you getting your own money back, this is you getting somebody else’s money.
So, a family that makes $30,000 a year could actually get $14,000 that they didn’t pay. Let’s say they paid zero in income tax, they could get $14,000 back. One, we don’t have the money—it’s a new entitlement program and two, if you get $14,000 back do you think the insurance company is ever going to sell insurance for less than $14,000? That becomes the floor. So, it actually pushes insurance rates up—it doesn’t allow insurance rates to fall.
So, that doesn’t allow insurance rates to fall and it sets up a new entitlement.

The second thing that Paul Ryan’s Obamacare Lite bill does is they keep the Obamacare taxes—all of them—for a year. And then after a year, they keep the Cadillac Tax forever. That’s the tax on if you have really good insurance, Obamacare taxes that. So will Paul Ryan’s plan.
The third thing they do that is Obamacare-like is they keep the individual mandate. It seems like every Republican says they were against the individual mandate. That’s if you didn’t buy insurance you had to pay a penalty to the government, a tax. Obamacare Lite, Paul Ryan’s plan, just changes it so you have to pay a penalty to the insurance companies. I consider that to still be a mandate that isn’t consistent with those of us who want less government involvement. So they keep the subsidies, they keep the taxes, and then they keep the mandate.
Then the fourth thing they do is they actually subsidize the insurance companies. Right now, insurance companies are losing money and Obamacare has this rescue thing called ‘risk corridors’ to bail out the insurance companies. Paul Ryan has got the same thing, he just calls it reinsurance and it’s $100 million worth. I predict that might not even be enough.
So I don’t like any of it. Now, I do think we agree as Republicans on repeal. But I don’t think we agree on the replacement. That’s why I say we should separate them, vote on repeal and then vote the same day on a separate bill that’s called replace.
 RW note:

I like that Rand is calling for two separate votes, one on repeal and one on replace. It appears as though the repeal bill would pass but not the current replacement bill. Rand has to know this. It is a backdoor way into free market healthcare---until a replacement bill is passed after (months?) of negotiations, and if we are lucky that will never happen.

2 comments:

  1. If you wish your health insurance to be efficient, affordable, responsive and actually about your health, then government has NO place in it.

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  2. It's a shame Rand cucked on so many other issues during the primary. It was his race to lose.

    ReplyDelete