Healthcare Plans

For this week's issue, we'll look at candidates' Healthcare Plans. Once again, all information and videos are taken directly from the candidates' websites, either in part or in whole, unless otherwise noted, with minimal alteration to clarify and streamline information.

Barack Obama
Summarized from Obama's Website

• Before health reform, insurance premiums were skyrocketing, and the shared cost of caring for the uninsured added $1,000 to the typical family’s policy. President Obama passed the Affordable Care Act to restore healthcare as a basic cornerstone of middle-class security in America. The Affordable Care Act will make healthcare more affordable for families and small businesses and brings much needed transparency to the insurance industry. When fully implemented, the Affordable Care Act will keep insurance companies from taking advantage of consumers, including denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and cancelling coverage when someone gets sick. Because of the new law, 34 million more Americans will gain coverage, many of which will be able to afford insurance for the first time. Once the law is fully implemented, about 95 percent of Americans under age 65 will have insurance.
• Under the new act, working families are protected from losing their health care or being forced into bankruptcy when a family member gets sick or is in an accident. Families have the security of knowing their health insurance will be there when they need it most. Insurance companies are now required to justify rate hikes and provide rebates if they don’t spend at least 80 percent of premiums on care instead of overhead, marketing, and profits, and consumers have the ability to appeal to an independent third party when insurance companies refuse to cover services or care. As many as 9 million consumers are expected to get up to $1.4 billion in rebates because the President passed the Affordable Care Act.
• Starting in 2014, all Americans will have access to affordable health insurance no matter their circumstances—whether they change jobs, lose their job, decide to start a business, or retire early. Purchasing private insurance in the new state-based health insurance exchanges could save middle-class families who can’t get employer-provided insurance thousands of dollars. Once fully implemented, the law will slow health care premium growth rates, adding another $2,000 to family savings by 2019, and the law is expected to reduce the deficit by $127 billion from 2012 to 2021.
• Fact: The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) provides insurance to people with health conditions who have been uninsured for six months, helping those with cancer or other serious conditions to get the treatment they need.
• Before the Affordable Care Act, more than half of all private insurance plans included a lifetime limit on coverage, and nearly 20,000 people hit a lifetime cap each year. The Affordable Care Act banned these caps, and those who had already hit a lifetime limit will be eligible for unlimited coverage. Also, young adults are now eligible to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans as they enter the workforce, until they turn 26. Since the health care law passed, 3.1 million young adults, traditionally the group least likely to be insured, gained insurance because of the Affordable Care Act.
• More than 47 million Medicare beneficiaries now have access to free health services, including an annual wellness visit, mammograms, and other health screenings, to help detect and treat medical conditions early. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, nearly 3.6 million seniors who fell into the Medicare “doughnut hole” last year saved an average of $604 on prescription drugs.
•  Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could deny coverage to children with medical conditions. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, as many as 17 million children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied health insurance. Also, all new insurance plans are required to cover certain preventive services without charging a co-pay or deductible.
• Millions of small businesses are now eligible for a tax credit to help pay for their health care premiums. The credit will increase to cover 50 percent of premium costs in 2014.
  Under the Affordable Care Act, help for small businesses—including the new insurance exchanges—will reduce small business health care spending by nearly 9 percent, according to independent estimates.

Romney's Rebuttal (Summarized From Romney's Website)

• The transformation in American health care set in motion by Obamacare will take us in precisely the wrong direction. The bill, itself more than 2,400 pages long, relies on a dense web of regulations, fees, subsidies, excise taxes, exchanges, and rule-setting boards to give the federal government extraordinary control over every corner of the health care system. The costs are commensurate: Obamacare added a trillion dollars in new health care spending. To pay for it, the law raised taxes by $500 billion on everyone from middle-class families to innovative medical device makers, and then slashed $500 billion from Medicare.
• While Obamacare may create a new health insurance entitlement, it will only worsen the system’s existing problems. When was the last time a massive government program lowered cost, improved efficiency, or raised the consistency of service? Obamacare will violate that crucial first principle of medicine: “do no harm.” It will make America a less attractive place to practice medicine, discourage innovators from investing in life-saving technology, and restrict consumer choice.
• In short, President Obama’s trillion dollar federal takeover of the U.S. health care system is a disaster for the federal budget, a disaster for the constitutional principles of federalism, and a disaster for the American people.

 Mitt Romney
 Summarized from Romney's Website

• On his first day in office, Mitt Romney will issue an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all fifty states. He will then work with Congress to repeal the full legislation as quickly as possible. In place of Obamacare, Mitt will pursue policies that give each state the power to craft a health care reform plan that is best for its own citizens. The federal government’s role will be to help markets work by creating a level playing field for competition.
• Mitt will begin by returning states to their proper place in charge of regulating local insurance markets and caring for the poor, uninsured, and chronically ill. States will have both the incentive and the flexibility to experiment, learn from one another, and craft the approaches best suited to their own citizens. Mitt will also block grant Medicaid and other payments to states, limit federal standards and requirements on both private insurance and Medicaid coverage, ensure flexibility to help the uninsured, including public-private partnerships, exchanges, subsidies, the chronically ill, including high-risk pools, reinsurance, and risk adjustment, and offer innovation grants to explore non-litigation alternatives to dispute resolution.
• Competition drives improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, offering consumers higher quality goods and services at lower cost.  It can have the same effect in the health care system, if given the chance to work. Mitt would cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice lawsuits, empower individuals and small businesses to form purchasing pools, prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage, and facilitate IT interoperability.
• For markets to work, consumers must have the information and the power to make decisions about their own care.  Letting the patient determine everything about their process will drive quality up and cost down while ensuring that services are designed to provide what Americans actually want. Mitt would end tax discrimination against the individual purchase of insurance, allow consumers to purchase insurance across state lines, unshackle HSAs by allowing funds to be used for insurance premiums, promote "co-insurance" products, promote alternatives to "fee for service", and encourage "Consumer Reports"-type ratings of alternative insurance plans.

 Obama's Rebuttal (Summarized from Obama's Website)

• Mitt Romney is trying to convince the American people that he does not support a federal individual health care mandate, even though an individual mandate was a fundamental component of his own 2006 Massachusetts health care law, which he praised as a model for the nation.. That law was one of the models for the Affordable Care Act, but Romney insists that he has “opposed the idea of a federal mandate from the beginning” and that “the last thing” he’d ever do would be “to take what we had done for one state and impose it on the entire nation.” As is often the case with Romney, he had the opposite view just a few years ago.
• Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are attempting to hide their plan to end Medicare behind false attacks on President Obama. Obamacare protects benefits for the elderly, but the Romney-Ryan budget would put millionaires before seniors’ health care. 
•  Dedicated to repealing health reform, Mitt Romney said he doesn’t think all uninsured people with pre-existing conditions should be able to get coverage: “If they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like, ‘Hey guys. We can’t play the game like that.’ You’ve got to get insurance when you are well.”
• If Romney repealed Obamacare, he would hurt millions of Americans in at least these five ways:
  1. Millions of Americans could lose access to preventive services, including cancer screenings, blood pressure tests, and flu shots. [Source: HHS]
     
  2. Insurance companies could continue to deny coverage to as many as 129 million people with a pre-existing condition if they try to buy insurance on their own. [Source: HealthCare.gov]
     
  3. Young people could be kicked off their parents’ insurance when they turn 18 or graduate from college, instead of being covered until they are 26. [Source: HHS]
     
  4. Americans who fall into the Medicare “doughnut hole” would lose crucial discounts on prescriptions. [Source: HHS]
     
  5. Insurance companies could go back to spending as much as 40% of premiums on administrative overhead like CEO salaries and marketing. [Source: Healthcare.gov]
     
• With Mitt Romney at the helm, the GOP has been steadily chipping away at women’s health and women’s rights. They oppose abortion rights and have pledged to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood funding. Even worse, Rep. Todd Akin—in explaining his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape—said victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.” Akin’s egregious, false, and deeply disturbing view only exemplifies how extreme the Republican Party—led by Romney and Ryan—has become on issues important to women. Take a look at where the GOP ticket stands on women’s health:
• Redefine rape: Ryan co-sponsored a bill that, among other things, narrowed the definition of rape to “forcible rape.” As the National Women’s Law Center explained, the proposal “speaks to a distinction between rape where there must be some element of force in order to rise to the standard, and rape where this is not ... it takes us back to a time where just saying no was not enough.” 
• Ban abortion even in cases of rape or incest: Romney backed a proposal to outlaw all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. He also supports the Republican Party platform, which includes a Human Life Amendment that bans abortion without those exceptions. Ryan co-sponsored a personhood bill that defines life as beginning at conception—a definition that would mean “abortion and some forms of birth control could be construed as murder.”
• Employer control over birth control coverage: Romney said “of course” he supports a bill that would’ve allowed any employer to deny women coverage for birth control. Ryan co-sponsored a similar proposal in the House and called the Obamacare rule that provides access to contraception without out-of-pocket costs “an affront to religious liberty.”
• Defund Planned Parenthood: Romney pledged to “get rid of” funding for Planned Parenthood. Ryan repeatedly voted to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides crucial health services to women across the country. All federal funding goes towards medical services like reproductive health services, birth control, cancer screenings—but not abortion services.
• Every day, women across American grapple with extremely difficult and deeply personal health decisions that should be made between a woman and her doctor, not dictated by politicians. While President Obama is committed to protecting a woman’s right to make her own health decisions, the Romney-Ryan ticket would “take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”
• At a press conference with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Sandra Fluke cited the Republican Party's attitudes and actions toward Planned Parenthood as indicative of how extreme the party has become—and just how dangerous their agenda is for women. "I just find it astonishing that the first bill that this House of Representatives chose to pass was a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. When they chose to defund Planned Parenthood, that was literally the choice to take away breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, and access to contraception. I don't understand the mindset that says that's the most important, critical thing to do. Day one, we need to take away breast cancer screenings for women? Mr. Ryan was part of that decision. Mr. Romney has endorsed that decision."

Conclusion
In summary, Obama has robust and inclusive plan to help get the same healthcare services to as many Americans as possible, while Romney wants to leave healthcare to individual states by removing as much federal involvement and funding as possible.
Turn in Friday for the Superhero opinions.
~James