August 18 Republican plan-to-repeal-obamacare/article_cab7a2b8-1266-5871-847d-4878d5ad16b5.html”>Scott Walker on Tuesday unveiled a new healthcare proposal that, like those floated by other conservative presidential candidates, calls for repealing Obamacare, which the Wisconsin governor wants to replace with tax credits and other changes.
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Walker’s health-care plan, which would provide tax credits to those who do not receive health insurance through their employer and allow consumers to shop for insurance across state lines, is largely based on the proposal released by the 2017 Project in February of 2014. The Wisconsin governor couched his policy as one of common sense – pledging to channel the political aspirations of the everyman should he take the White House. “I call it the Day One Patient Freedom Plan”.
Walker’s plan for health care included no changes for the separate Medicare program except for repealing Obamacare, which does have some provisions affecting that program. As all conservative Republicans do, Scott Walker hates Washington with the kind of passion that only a person who is desperately trying to get America to send him there can muster.
“Walker emphasizes a state-focused, outside of Washington approach; in keeping with the perspective of a Midwestern Republican governor”.
For those people, Walker offers a pastiche of tax credits and health savings accounts that are supposed to make coverage affordable and return control back to the people.
Walker’s plan does not include cost figures or an estimate of the number of people who would be covered making it impossible to compare his plan to Obamacare, which insures about 16 million uninsured people and millions of underinsured. The plan also proposes to reform Medicaid, something that is badly needed because it ill-serves the poor.
Walker acknowledged the troubles Obamacare encountered since its launch, including Obama’s claim that people can keep their existing health care plan, which secured itself as Politifact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year”.
“There is not a new idea in here”.
Walker said he’ll give Congress incentives to go along with the proposal. He would deal with preexisting conditions by broader use of state high-risk pools, which in practice have proved to be extremely expensive.
Mr. Walker’s plan would also deregulate the long-term care insurance market and incentivize states to reform litigation tied to medical services. Walker would offset that lost revenue by reductions in Medicaid payments and a tax on high-cost health plans.
“The tax credits would cost the federal government a substantial amount of money, but the plan would repeal all the revenue sources in the Affordable Care Act”, Levitt said.
Walker said repealing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, would free up $1 trillion in tax credits.
“I will fight for the American people over and over and over and over again”, Walker added. To his credit, he’s been honest about the fact that, as a governor, he hasn’t studied federal issues in almost the depth that he needs to. And critically, it’s no longer smart politics to be hush-hush about it: Any Republican president is going to have to sell the American people on a genuine vision of where to take the health care system. Plus, he’d eliminate all Obamacare’s sources of revenue, without really specifying what would replace them. Walker released a brief policy paper Tuesday, which he elaborated on during a speech delivered, as a few sharp observers noted on Twitter, before the symbolically inconvenient backdrop of a screw machine factory.
That’s not to say that Walkercare is Obamacare Light.
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“I’m willing to stand up against anyone, including members of my own party”, he said, “to get the job done”.
