Here in Wisconsin many will almost certainly face rising insurance premiums, while in New York, according to state officials, health care premiums will be cut in half.
Why? Disparities in how different states are implementing the Affordable Health Care Act.
When Governor Scott Walker and his conservative cronies rejected $12 billion in Medicaid funding, they denied coverage for 84,000 of our state’s poor, plus they increased the health insurance costs for the rest of us. Wisconsin taxpayers will have to pay $119 million more to cover fewer people.
With two elections and a Supreme Court decision confirming Obamacare, it is now the law of the land. The GOP has continually ignored this fact and has even have tried to repeal Obamacare 40 times.
Never mind that the law has already returned more than $7 billion from insurance companies for various fraudulent activities perpetrated on the customers. Or that Obamacare has contributed to the slowest rise in annual health care costs over the past 50 years and is projected to continue lowering premiums due to private competition, which is a GOP principle, when convenient.
Never mind that children can no longer be denied coverage or dropped from insurance coverage because they are too sick. Or that Obamacare is projected to lower our deficit more than $1 trillion over the next two decades while extending coverage for millions of young people by allowing them to remain on their parents’ insurance plan until age 26.
The GOP is more concerned about scaring people over the fine tuning that any reform program of this nature will require. “Accent the negative, eliminate the positive,” seems to be their motto.
Meanwhile, Republicans threaten to shut down the government if they don’t get their way.
They habitually avoid offering any solutions to the problem of too few Americans having access to health care,even as health care costs were soaring costs until the Affordable Care Act was enacted.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the GOP has no plan and they don’t care how many people Obamacare will help.