Paul Ryan's "high risk pool" funding for pre-existing is $4.5 BILLION less per year than needed

[Miles Archer]

Paul Ryan’s Obamacare Replacement Is A Death Sentence For Cancer Patients

Just to make it crystal clear, Ryan thinks cancer patients and other pre-existing conditions are ruining healthcare for everyone else, “So we, obviously, want to have a system where they can get affordable coverage without going bankrupt because they get sick. But, we can do that without destroying the rest of the healthcare system for everybody else. That’s the point I’m trying to make. What we should have done was fix what was broken in health care without breaking what was working in healthcare, and that’s what, unfortunately, Obamacare did. So, by financing state high-risk pools to guarantee people get affordable coverage when they have a pre-existing condition, like yourself, what you’re doing is, you’re dramatically lowering the price of insurance for everybody else.”

The true evil in the Republican plan is that by separating out the high-risk patients from everyone else, Ryan and Trump can keep costs down by underfunding the pool for people who need healthcare the most with less money.

The always excellent Charles Gaba wrote, “Well, Ryan is proposing a $25 billion risk pool fund over a 10 year period. That sounds like a lot, but it only averages $2.5 billion per year (I presume it’s less the first few years, more later on via inflation). According to this article by Ian Milhiser at Think Progress, to adequately cover 875,000 high-risk patients would have cost seven billion per year…and that was in 2008. That’s 2.8x as much as Ryan is proposing, and that was 9 years ago (10, if we assume the new plan doesn’t go into effect until 2018). I have to imagine that $7B would be up to at least $10B by then, and that’s for 875,000 patients.”

2.4 million Americans have expensive pre-existing conditions. The Republican answer to their healthcare costs is to lump them all in an underfunded state-run high-risk pool, where there will be a waiting list of 6-12 months, and lifetime benefits limits, and tell them good luck beating your life threatening illness with less healthcare.

http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/13/paul-ryans-obamacare-replacement-death-sentence-cancer-patients.html

[angstlessk]

1. 6-12 months waiting as a cancer patient and no one needs healthcare.....problem solved

what a fucking genius!

[Girard442]

2. Deadpool.

[PA Democrat]

3. According to Ryan sick people are the problem.

Boy those sick people are ruining healthcare for the rest of us! Insurance companies will promise to give you cheap insurance if you promise never to get sick.

[AJT]

4. Are the 875,000 high risk patients

only the people not covered by work or medicare? Is that the number of high risk people that would be covered by the ACA?

[Miles Archer]

6. This article is linked to in the article from my OP and may explain it better:

What I take away from the article is that $7 billion per year would cover 875,000 people with pre-existing conditions (until rising healthcare costs and inflation set in, of course), and that applies to people enrolled in the ACA or whatever the Republicans replace it with. Hence the title of the article below:

If you have a preexisting health condition, don’t even think about leaving your job

https://thinkprogress.org/if-you-have-a-preexisting-health-condition-dont-even-think-about-leaving-your-job-f7d26493745b#.aqk8ijfkb

Because high risk pools take on the most expensive health care consumers, they are expensive to maintain. And when states attempted to set them up in the past, they did not fund them enough to cover more than a fraction of what was needed. As one report explained when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed high risk pools during his 2008 presidential bid, these pools “have not been a viable alternative for the medically uninsured because of high premiums…and inadequate funding to subsidize the full cost of providing insurance to a high-cost population.”

McCain’s plan is informative regarding what a Republican proposal for high-risk pools is likely to look like. The Arizona senator proposed spending between $7 to $10 billion on these pools. But that would only cover a fraction of the Americans who would lose their health insurance if Obamacare is repealed. A national program “funded at $7 billion per year would cover only 875,000 people,” and that was in 2008. Alternatively, “even if participants had to pay half of their own premiums, as is generally the case today in state high risk pools, less than 2 million Americans would be covered.”

Obamacare provides health insurance to about 20 million Americans.

[Trust Buster]

5. No individual mandate , no coverage for pre-existing conditions. I don't need a whole article to

articulate that.