Our Indiana Health Insurance Company Talks about the American Health Care Act Bill
A lot of commentators, journalists & health care experts are voicing their views on the American Health Care Act. The reality is, the changes the senate are going to make will determine the true impact to health coverage.
The supporters of the Obamacare, are giving little support to any ideas of new healthcare reform. The biggest impact of Obamacare has been the expansion of Medicaid. Here in Indiana, we now have close to 500,000 people on the HIP 2.0. We have less than 170,000 on exchange plans.
The AHCA will change how Medicaid is funded and slowly remove the expansion as we know it. This will force medical providers to change their fee structure. This may be an underlying goal to move the country away from a fee for service health care model.
There are a lot of views on who wins and who loses under the AHCA.
If you purchase individual health insurance (without subsidies) you can’t lose. Current market conditions under the ACA are imploding. Premiums are at an all-time high, along with out of pockets. Then we add the lack of network access. There will not be an individual market in 2018 without reform.
If no individual plans exist or just one, anything will be better than Obamacare.
The predicted losers would have to be the poor. If Medicaid expansion is eventually phased out, what will happen to this segment of the population. State officials and leaders will have access to federal grants. These federal dollars can be used to reach health care goals of helping the working poor. Every state leader is going to have to work towards compromise to put a solution in place. The health care providers will have to be open to compromise.
Employers will win, they will no longer be required to provide all the reporting requirements under the ACA. Companies have allocated huge amount of resources to be compliant under the ACA. New industries have been created to provide the administration needed.
Group health plans will go down in cost. Right off the bat, we will see the taxes from the ACA removed. That is almost 5% of the cost.
No more employer mandate will be in effect. The employer mandate devastated certain industries. Those industries, had never built their business model on providing health benefits.
To sum up the current bill, the poor will need state leadership to redevelop programs of health care. Federal dollars will be available to them.
The middle class and above, will have more options in plan choices, less government requirements, great plan designs, carrier competition, which will lower premiums.
