Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) introduced an amendment to the American Health Care Act Wednesday that would provide $8 billion over five years to help cover the insurance costs of individuals with pre-existing conditions.
A previous amendment to the AHCA, from Reps. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Tom MacArthur (R-NJ), drew criticism from some Republicans — Upton among them — worried that it removed Obamacare’s price protections for those individuals in certain states.
Read Upton’s amendment below:
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When someone is laying an obvious trap, there’s always an option to avoid it.
$8 billion over five years…which will probably be used up just covering people in Delaware, Wyoming, and Alaska. Take a bow, guy.
In addition to being evil, this is also really badly written and would be subject to all kinds of litigation. It essentially gives Price arbitrary power on how to allocate the money to the states that request waivers (and only those states, so it’s a sort of game of chicken – if only a few states go for waivers, they make out OK-ish, but if a lot of states do, everyone is done for.) And it’s written literally to only help people whose premiums go up as a result of the waiver. So if your coverage is trashed, or your co-pays and deductibles and out-of-pocket limits go through the roof, none of this money will be available to you.
$ 8 billion years is $ 1.6 billion/year. Assuming an average cost of $10,000/year for each patient with a serious chronic disease (and that may well be a low-ball number) this will cover 160,000 patients. Out of 300 million people.
So as long as only maybe half a dozen Red States decide to kill off their residents, it could almost work, kinda, sorta.