For the past twenty years Republicans have been failing to articulate and communicate broadly how they’d like to reform the health care system. Twenty years! In order to learn the details you have to go searching for them. The following two excellent posts from the National Center for Policy Analysis are the kind of thing you’d find.
Health Care for All without the Affordable Care Act
There is a way to provide health care to all with money that is already in the system. It will require no new taxes and no new spending, say John C. Goodman, president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Research Fellow with The Independent Institute and author of Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, and Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, director of entitlement and budget policy at the Heartland Institute, and a senior adviser on entitlement reform and budget policy for the National Tax Limitation Foundation.
The ACA only adds to the inefficiency and inequity of the current health care system. Currently, federal tax subsidies total about $300 billion a year for people that obtain private insurance. Much of the system is highly regressive and encourages waste. The proposal set forth by Goodman and Ferrara seeks to correct the inefficiencies and provide alternatives to the status quo to make health care affordable to everyone.
The Better Solution for “Pre-Existing Conditions”
Early in 2010, as the final debates over the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, neared an end, a parade of the legislation’s defenders appeared across the media. All had the same message: pre-existing conditions, says John C. Goodman, president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Research Fellow with The Independent Institute and author of Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.
The message surely resonated, but how many people have actually been affected since the law passed?
- The Affordable Care Act established a federally funded risk pool — the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan — that allows individuals with such disqualifying conditions to buy a policy for the same premium a healthy person would pay.
- About 82,000 people have signed up as of July 31, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s statehealthfacts.org.
- That is not a misprint: Out of a population of more than 300 million, some 82,000 have the problem that was cited as the principal reason for spending $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years and in the process turning the entire health care system upside down.
