Paul Ryan is doing a phone survey about the ACA, which he wants to replace with his Patients’ Choice Act. It is extremely easy to participate. Simply call the number listed below, press 2 to “express your opinion on the Affordable Care Act,” listen to a short message about the alternative plan Paul Ryan wants and then press 1 to say you support ACA. It is VERY easy.
(202) 225-0600
The Patients’ Choice Act has a lot of selling points that they like to push. One of the earlier drafts in 2013 would keep the bit of the ACA that didn’t allow insurers to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Of course, they were also saying “as long as you don’t have a lapse in coverage”… which is exactly what “pre-existing” means, so they’re probably blowing a lot of smoke up everyone’s asses.
The new PCA is vague, perhaps intentionally so. Even Paul Ryan’s website just has a bunch of discussion about how great it is without any detail as to what exactly it is. What we know for sure is that Paul Ryan has championed rolling back Medicare and Medicaid and forcing many who currently receive those services to private insurers, which as most of us know, are prohibitively expensive to almost everyone.
An oft-repeated Republican talking point is “Affordable care act isn’t affordable!” and believe it or not, most Democrats agree. We simply don’t agree with the Republican “solutions” like opening the marketplace for competition between states. The reasoning goes: you can get cheaper coverage from a company that operates out of, say, Georgia, which is a state that has fewer regulations than states with more expensive (read: regulated) insurance plans like California. What does fewer regulations mean? It means health insurance companies have more “freedom” to deny claims or refuse to cover things based on, well, whatever. Fewer regulations means they can make more changes that save money. For them. Not you. They can decide the treatment you want is experimental more often, or in my wife’s case, they can just decide they don’t cover transgender care and/or occasionally just remove doctors who provide such care from their networks.
So you can get crappier coverage for less. Essentially it’s the Wal-Mart vs. Publix (or Albertsons, or whatever you’ve got in your area) choice except it’s with your life. It’s like when Wal-Mart doesn’t carry diet vanilla cream soda and Publix does but for 1.00 more except the diet vanilla cream soda is breast cancer and the difference in price is $8,000 a year and you can already barely make your car payment so you choose not to buy the breast cancer coverage and you save money! Until you get breast cancer. Because health conditions are not like soda. You don’t get to choose which ones you get. Everything they tell you about choice is a fucking illusion designed to give insurers permission to let you die. Ta-da! Free market. Good for things like salmon colored pants; bad for things like health care.
Irony of ironies, those in favor of this sort of change are people in red states which already have the fewest regulations on their health insurance companies so if the market opens between states, the ones who voted for this are unlikely to see any actual reduction in price as a result of competition. They’re just currently feeling the most pain from healthcare prices because southern states are where wages are lowest in the country. Chances are that what would actually happen is low income people in states like NY and CA which have more regulations would end up buying cheaper coverage from places like Florida and screwing themselves out of the better protections they once had, thereby pricing NY and CA insurers out of the market and making sure that the only remaining care plans are unregulated pieces of absolute shit. So, take the survey. It’s better than doing nothing!
One Stamp a Week 