House Republican leaders have agreed upon a new alternative to the Affordable Care Act, titled “A Stronger Health Care System: The GOP Plan for Freedom, Flexibility, & Peace of Mind.”The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together.
The tenets of the plan — which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations — are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills.
As they finalize their alternative, House Republicans are continuing their years-long effort to take a legislative hammer to the law, passing a bill Friday that would delay the individual mandate and repeal Medicare’s sustainable-growth rate.
The proposal seeks to shift more power to the state level and enable more Americans to purchase plans from the private market. While it assumes Congress will repeal the ACA, it also gives them the option to keep certain aspects of the law, such as the ability to stay on a parent’s plan until you’re 26, in effect.
Up until now, the majority of the GOP’s healthcare talking points have focused on the problems with Obamacare. That has worked fine for the party, because those problems are very real and very troubling for so many Americans. Eventually, however, voters are going to want to hear more than just why Obamacare is bad; to that point, the GOP’s new proposal is a good start.
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/03/122091-gop-finally-gears-present-official-alternative-obamacare/
