Should-Read: Josh Barro: GOP healthcare bill will poll badly no matter what
Should-Read: Josh Barro: GOP healthcare bill will poll badly no matter what: “Now I have to call those providers’ offices and get duplicate receipts and upload them and allow seven to 10 days for processing… http://www.businessinsider.com/gop-healthcare-bill-polls-bad-changes-2017-6
…Until I do that, I have been cut off from access to the money in the account—my own money—that got in the account only because Congress chose to offer a tax preference that I could get only by using such an account.
Who wants to deal with this crap?
Nobody wants to deal with this crap, that’s who
Officially, the Republican healthcare vision involves even more of this—tracking your healthcare funds in a special account, paying at the point of delivery for care you receive, and shopping around for your surgery as if it’s a dream vacation. For the past seven years, Republicans haven’t been saying the problem with Obamacare was too little out-of-pocket spending. They’ve been saying the opposite… that Obamacare plans have deductibles… coinsurance payments are too high. That insurance under Obamacare isn’t good insurance because people have to pay so much after they’ve already paid premiums. This was an effective political argument because this is, in fact, one of the things people hate about Obamacare….
The problem is, fixing that problem would have cost money. So Republicans lied. They said they would give people insurance with lower deductibles. But then they wrote a law that would result in eye-wateringly high deductibles—for example, a deductible of about $6,000 for somebody with a family income of $16,000. Of course that’s unpopular. (News flash: Someone with an income of $16,000 doesn’t have $6,000 to pay toward a deductible.) But it’s what you have to do if you want the bill to cut a trillion dollars in government spending on healthcare without actually doing anything to make healthcare cheaper. But then, this bill was never about improving healthcare or making healthcare consumers happy. It was about repealing the tax increases that Obamacare imposed. Both the House and Senate bills would indeed do that. And as long as that’s the core goal, there’s no way to restructure the law to make people not hate it…