A key problem is that ACA’s architects, in an effort to gain the support of Americans who liked their health insurance, chose to leave the long-standing system – that is, employer-provided insurance – in place.
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Prior to the Affordable Care Act, the individual marketplace for health insurance was deeply broken. Cigna and Humana will compete with BlueCross in Tennessee’s urban cities with individual health care plans, but they are each planning rate increases of more than 40 percent in 2017.
Before the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, many aspiring entrepreneurs were stuck in their jobs and unable to start businesses because they needed employer-sponsored health insurance. “It’s clear something’s wrong”, Wilson said.
Liberal groups helping to push it will include MoveOn.Org, the liberal media site Daily Kos, the liberal media organization Democracy for America, the Working Families Party, Presente.org (a self-described “Latinx” organization that advocates for Latinos), and UltraViolet, a women’s rights group.
Resolved, that the Senate supports efforts to build on the Affordable Care Act by ensuring that, in addition to the coverage options provided by private insurers, every American has access to a public health insurance option which, when established, will strengthen competition, improve affordability for families by reducing premiums and increasing choices, and save American taxpayers billions of dollars.
Obama points to the set of policy changes his administration offered in recent weeks created to address some concerns voiced by insurance companies, but he also solicits the insurers’ help in reaching young, healthy consumers who remain without coverage. It wasn’t flexible enough so that people could buy as much coverage as they wanted and could afford – not what the government dictated. So long as the new public option won’t add to ObamaCare’s costs, the state can use the law’s subsidies to pay for government-run plans.
What is the importance of new insurers entering the ACA exchanges as insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealth Group reduce their involvement? But this isn’t a matter of “I told you so” – far from it.
People all across the country are seeing their premiums spike, and sadly, it’s slated to get worse. Many healthy people primarily want catastrophic coverage. Replace it with “that’s because”, and you have a better picture of what’s happening. Some exchanges are in dire condition, with only a single insurer. Private insurers like Aetna, UHC, and Blue Cross ended up having to cover thousands of older, sicker people that otherwise would have been covered by an expanded Medicaid. The risk corridor, which was a type of risk-pooling fund expected to save money-losing insurers on the ACA, simply didn’t have the funds to pay out needy insurers, causing 16 co-ops to close up shop.
Louise Norris, a writer for HealthInsurance.org, says most of the people she works with fall into that second category.
“The fact that they are not covered by Medicaid is not a cost-saving mechanism”, Wilson said.
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Earlier this year, I convinced my colleagues on city council to increase the city’s assistance to Alexandria Neighborhood Health Services by $102,641, which has enabled them to provide primary care services to an additional 700 uninsured adults with 1,500 health care visits.
