Obamacare Replacement

The Young and the Healthy are no longer required to pay for the Old and the Sickly, the government will do that…God help them. Now that we don’t have a “Right” to healthcare insurance, it might get cheaper.

Consumers will want cheap catastrophic health insurance coverage. The mandated coverages in Obamacare are too expensive when you will never use the coverages you get from Obamacare.  Nuns don’t need birth control pills and the young and healthy only need vitamins and minerals.

Young and healthy consumers have traditionally shunned health insurance unless they got an ok deal with their employer’s plan.  The other young and healthy group are lower paid and struggling to pay for their food and shelter. They may have medical coverage with their auto insurance. They are happy to not pay fines for not having or providing health insurance.

In 2011, before fines and penalties were applied to Obamacare, there were 48.6 million of 308.8 population or 15.7% who were uninsured. 63% of these uninsured made less than $50,000 a year. 37% of the uninsured made more than $50,000 a year. 55.1% of the population had health insurance through their employers. 36.1% were on Medicare, Medicaid or Military. 9.8% had individual policies. 15.7% were uninsured.

I expect the US will see more 40 hour per week jobs, because there is no penalty to employers who don’t offer health insurance. If employers continue to offer health coverage to employees, they may restrict this to those who work 40 hours or more per week like they used to.

If employers offer to pay a share to healthcare savings accounts, we could see more citizens opting for that, plus a cheap high deductible catastrophic plan. These cheap plans used to cost $250 per year a decade ago.  The number of consumers who chose low cost insurance could be 40% of all potential health care consumers. Healthcare savings could be used to pay a high deductible or be used to cover out-of-pocket expenses. If healthcare savings are unused, they would be invested and grow like an extra 401k plan.  

Republicans will make sure that medical savings accounts are available, so citizens can tuck away more pre-tax dollars into their own accounts to “self-insure”. They will also allow all healthcare costs as deductions on your IRS 1040 Schedule A. They should also remove the 10% of income hurdle that now appears on Schedule A Medical Expenses.

Those expensive souls who do not have other government coverages like Medicare, Medicaid and Military will probably be subsidized by federal block grants to States. Hopefully, States will manage these grant funds better and try to get costs down for things like Diabetes II.

https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-report/overview-uninsured-united-states-summary-2012-current-population-survey-report

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader