Understanding FREOPP's Obamacare replacement in 10 minutes of less.

Posted: Jan 6, 2017

Things that Obamacare does that Transcending Obamacare doesn’t 1.Induce rate shock. The ACA introduces an entirely new layer of federal regulations into the individual health insurance market: tens of thousands of pages of onerous requirements that drive up the cost of health coverage. Transcending Obamacare is carefully designed to cover the uninsured without drastic premium hikes. 2.Force people to buy health insurance. Infamously, the ACA contains an individual mandate, imposing financial penalties on those who would prefer not to buy Obamacare’s costly coverage. Transcending Obamacare has no such mandate, and uses other well-validated tools, like longer insurance contracts, waiting periods, late enrollment fees, and auto-enrollment, to ensure that enrollees don’t game the system. 3.Expand low-quality, government-run health insurance. The ACA covers the uninsured mostly by dramatically expanding Medicaid, a dysfunctional 1960s-era program that delivers no better health outcomes than its enrollees would have with no insurance at all. Transcending Obamacare replaces the ACA Medicaid expansion by offering the same population refundable tax credits that they can deposit in health savings accounts and use to purchase high-quality private coverage. 4.Expand the federal role in the health care system. The ACA substantially increases the already large role of the federal government in the U.S. health care system. Transcending Obamacare puts patients in charge of the health care dollars that are now spent on their behalf by the government. Over three decades, it reduces federal spending by $10.5 trillion and federal taxes by $2.5 trillion, while making the Medicare Trust Fund permanently solvent and covering more people than Obamacare. Things that Transcending Obamacare does that Obamacare doesn’t do 1.Expand choice for health coverage and care. Obamacare’s plethora of federal regulations have dramatically restricted the kinds of coverage that individuals who shop for coverage on their own can buy. Transcending Obamacare goes in the other direction, restoring states’ traditional role in regulating the insurance markets in their jurisdictions, and expanding access to health savings accounts that can be used to obtain care from any health care provider. Reduce premiums relative to current law. The ACA has doubled individual-market premiums relative to where they were before Obamacare went into effect. Transcending Obamacare reduces premiums by restoring choice and competition to the health insurance market, and by tackling other drivers of high-cost health care, such as hospital consolidation. 3.Improve health outcomes for the poor. By replacing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion with high-quality private coverage and health savings accounts, Transcending Obamacare gives lower-income Americans significantly greater access to physician care than they have under Obamacare. We estimate that Transcending Obamacare’s Universal Tax Credit Plan would nearly double access to physicians and hospitals for the Medicaid population, and would achieve for Medicaid enrollees a 159 percent improvement in the Medical Productivity Index, a proxy for health outcomes developed by the University of Minnesota. Replaces Obamacare without disrupting coverage for the newly insured. If you want to cover people with pre-existing conditions, without an individual mandate forcing others to buy coverage, your reforms of the individual insurance market have to be crafted with care. As of 2016, the most widely discussed GOP plans don’t do enough to ensure people stay in the market without an individual mandate. Private health insurers, who will be tasked with offering coverage to the uninsured under Republican reform, are very concerned about this problem. Popular Republican proposals, like high risk pools, cause as many problems as they solve. All of the GOP plans proposed thus far are likely to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office as covering far fewer people than the ACA.;