Saturday, October 13, 2018

Walker has to keep fixing things he broke, like Health Care.

I was going to "Hulk Smash" Scott Walker's claim that thanks to him, insurance rates will be lower on the ACA exchanges, but then I found a few other wildly important points of interest.


First, Walker is again saving us all from himself and Trump's sabotage of the ACA-ObamaCare. Citizen Action:
Walker’s actions have increased premiums on individual market by at least 17%, and Donald Trump’s sabotage of the ACA has increased premiums by at least 18%.
And Walker's grand 4.2 percent savings in 2019 (a smaller increase)?

A Brookings Institution study estimated that absent federal policies disrupting the marketplaces, premiums would have dropped 4.3 percent nationwide in 2019.
Wow, thanks, Scott Walker.
Tens of thousands more would have health care and tax payers would have an extra $1 billion. That’s if Walker would have expanded BadgerCare," said TJ Helmstetter, Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
This is What Walker Calls Success??? Walker is spending all his time putting out the GOP fires he and Trump have created. Thankfully, you can now send that extra pocket change from Walker's tax cuts to insurers:
1. Minnesota’s premiums are decreasing for 2019; Minn-13% vs Wi-6%.

2. 45% more expensive in Wisconsin in 2018 to 59% more expensive in 2019.

3. $533 per month for premiums in Wisconsin vs. $335 in Minnesota for a 40-year-old purchasing the benchmark plan on their own without a federal tax credit.
Republicans we're Scaring Insurers: It wasn't the ACA so much as it was repeal-and-replace:
Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation (said) "There was a repeal-and-replace debate going on. President Trump was out there talking about the law collapsing," Levitt said. Congress and the president ended certain subsidies for low-income Americans. To prepare for that, and for just general chaos, insurers raised rates. But then things turned out to be not as terrible as insurance companies thought ... enrollment stayed remarkably stable this year.
And besides reinsurance...
One reason 2019 premiums will be lower? It has to do with how high they were in 2018. They increased by an average of 36.9 percent for 2018. "These premium decreases are really about returning excess profits," he said.
Here's audio from NPR's Marketplace that explains what happened, and why Walker is just taking credit again, for something that for the most part was happening anyway:


In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, insurance company profits are higher than they were before Obamacare. And now some insurers are returning to markets they'd abandoned.
But all of this goes out the window if Walker, AG Brad Schimel, and Congress get the court decision they worked so hard to get:
Wisconsin is one of the lead states in the lawsuit that argues the ACA should be scrapped because Congress got rid of the penalty for not having insurance when they passed the GOP tax cut bill.

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