American Bridge President Jessica Mackler issued the following response to reports about how the MacArthur Amendment to Trumpcare would gut coverage of essential health benefits and pre-existing conditions through a major loophole:
“Trumpcare would already cost 26 million Americans their health care and discriminate against working people, the elderly, and rural Americans with skyrocketing health care prices. But these new changes would make Trumpcare even more painful for the American people — by using an insidious backdoor to hammer individuals with pre-existing conditions and ending coverage for essential services like hospitalization, maternity care and prescription drugs. It’s disgusting, and it can’t be allowed to happen.”
KEY COVERAGE EXCERPTS FROM THIS MORNING:
Northwestern University Kellogg School of Business Health Economist Craig Garthwaite: “If you allow the essential benefits to go away, you will have lower premiums because it’s a skinner product. The people working on this don’t seem to understand the market ramifications of what they are doing.”
Larry Levitt, Kaiser Family Foundation: “That’s almost exactly what insurance was like before the ACA.”
Sarah Kliff, Vox: “Insurers could charge sick people more and cover fewer benefits….It means that states could, for example, end the essential health benefits requirement because they believe it will lower premium costs. And of course it would!”
Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times: “Reminder: You can’t really have guaranteed issue without community rating.”
Jonathan Cohn, Huffington Post: “New ‘compromise’ on Trumpcare would hollow out pre-ex condition protections — and it would still decimate Medicaid”
Peter Sullivan, The Hill: “…states would have the option to apply for waivers to allow them to repeal one of ObamaCare’s core protections for people with pre-existing conditions, called community rating. That means insurers would no longer be prevented from charging people with pre-existing conditions higher premiums because of their illness.”
- Peter Sullivan, The Hill: “‘There’s no deal,’ said an aide to a moderate House GOP lawmaker. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they started to lose more moderates’ because of the new changes, the aide added.”
Tom Howell Jr., Washington Times: “Policy analysts also say high-risk pools will likely need even more funding to work, and that scrapping essential health benefits comes with pitfalls.”
Published: Apr 20, 2017