Walker is expected to say that, if elected, he would submit legislation to Congress seeking to repeal the federal Affordable Care Act and replace it with his sweeping package of conservative priorities.
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Walker’s full health care proposal can be found here.
Walker’s campaign said the plan would be paid for by eliminating $1 trillion in taxes that are levied under the current law and by making other changes to Medicaid and how health insurance is taxed.
Walker’s and Rubio’s plans, as well as that of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, would undo that crucial part of damage from Obamacare, allowing insurers to tailor plans (no more forced maternity coverage for 70 year-olds) and permit more flexible arrangements like miniature plans. And states, not the federal government, would decide the minimum level of benefits that need to be provided in health insurance plans.
Mr. Walker called his plan “cost neutral”, but he didn’t explain how he would pay $802 billion in increased Medicare spending that would come from repealing the Affordable Care Act.
Walker’s proposal is 15 pages long, although five of those pages contain only stylized logos and three pages are devoted to tearing apart Obamacare: “ObamaCare made an already broken system worse”.
“There is not a new idea in here”.
Similar to Obamacare, Walker wants to provide tax credits for people not insured by their employer. They would enable individuals and families to quickly and easily evaluate their options and make informed choices about their own health care.
Levitt pointed to a central problem with Walker’s plan: the cost.
Some conservatives, however, argue these tax credits are merely another expensive and unfunded entitlement. It’s not clear how that would be enforced without the so-called individual mandate that’s inherent to the current law; Walker did not take questions from the press at the Brooklyn Center event.
The tax credits based on age – $1,200 a year for people ages 18 to 34 and $3,000 a year for those 50 to 64, for example – would be easier to administer than the income-based subsidies under Obamacare, said Tom Miller, a health care policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. However, they have been somewhat deficient as to what exactly they would replace it with. “The ACA is now the status quo, and plans like this would upend coverage for a lot of people”.
Certainly imperfect, Walker’s plan is still quite good all around – particularly given the political and economic reality any reform has to take into account. And while alternatives have been introduced in Congress, none has gotten traction as Republicans have yet to coalesce around any particular idea.
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The governor of Wisconsin has started the beginning stages of attempting to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Still, he insisted in his Tuesday speech he’d get the job done. “Imagine all the people who have coverage for the first time” as a result of the ACA, Spiro said. A September 2012 report by the Commonwealth Fund used data from the ACA’s Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, a bridge program for people with pre-existing conditions, to show that high-risk pools would likely not be a successful way to insure large groups of people.
