Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier on GOP Health Care Bill: ‘This Is Damage Control for Obamacare’
by SEAN MORAN
BreitBart.com
19 May 2017
The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Haislmaier told Breitbart News that Congress’s health care bill acts as damage control for Obamacare.
Haislmaier told Breitbart that the House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) will move health care in the right direction, although, the Senate can make improvements to the bill. He said, “It is progress, and now it moves over to the Senate. The Senate is really the final decision maker where it is really going to make a difference.”
The Heritage scholar added that he likes the idea of a tax credit to purchase health insurance, however, there could be better ways to model the tax credit. He said, “I think the problem with the House’s tax credit is that they could have more thoroughly modeled different ways of doing it, and hopefully in the Senate, they can have several variants and come up with a better design.”
Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) proposed a solution for higher premiums that would auto-enroll Americans without health insurance into a basic, catastrophic health care plan paid for by an individual’s federal tax credit. The Louisiana senator explained, “Your best way to lower premiums is to expand the risk pool … auto-enrollment would allow expansion of the risk pools.”
Haislmaier noted some of the complexities behind the idea of auto-enrolling Americans who forgo health insurance. He stated:
As for auto-enrolling Americans without health insurance, you are mainly talking about a group of low-income people who choose not to buy insurance even if they are healthy. It’s a practical question how do you make that work and stay with it, and especially for people who are loosely connected to the workforce, and don’t have a lot of income and usually go to a clinic to get care. This is the problem with expanding Medicaid; it does not do a lot to change their behavior, it does a lot more to get the hospital paid.
So there’s a number of issues you have to think through on that, that I believe they have to do.
Once you enroll people, how do you keep them in the system? They do not want to pay nominal premiums, and that’s what happened with Obamacare. With Obamacare, we got them insured in very subsidized coverage, and the insurers were surprised that once they were healthy, they would not even pay ten bucks to keep the coverage.
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