To Senate Republicans,
What’s going on with you lately?
I often feel like you waffle between listening and not listening. Many of you seem disengaged from your constituents. You’re trying to push legislature onto your constituents without even considering what we might want. You’re not holding town meetings or trying to start conversations to figure out what we want. Are we screaming into voided space?
You know, not everyone is an expert at healthcare. I’ve worked in the industry for ten years and I still don’t know it all. The majority of your constituents likely don’t believe that each of you should understand everything about healthcare because it’s so complex. However, there are a few things you must put in effort to understand.
What makes a market stable? Insurance mandate does. How? Forcing sick individuals without healthy individuals into the market makes it so that insurance companies have a hard time paying out for the sick claims. You need healthy paying people to offset the cost of the sick people because the healthy individuals aren’t going to need as much coverage from the insurance. That’s one way the mandate stabilizes the market.
The other way? It creates coverage for the individuals who couldn’t otherwise pay their bills. If a hospital can’t collect on their bill then they essentially have to raise cost of their services to offset the cost they can’t return back into the market.
Additionally, high risk pools are unstable. They force people to spend a lot of money in premiums for little coverage. Which causes them to be unable to pay their bills when they are able to receive care.
Which brings me to the Risk Corridor. You, Senate GOP, voted to not pay out the risk corridor. In doing so you created the instability of the market to begin with. The Risk Corridor is a fund that reimburses the Insurance Companies for taking on the sickest individuals. In not paying this fund out you began to create instability for the Affordable Care Act that was previously very stable.
First, insurance companies had to increase premiums to make up for the costs of paying out for the sickest individuals. Then, after the premiums didn’t satisfy their company’s deficit, many began to pull out of the marketplace. Some even shut down. For example: Arches in Utah? They had to close doors not even two years into servicing Affordable Care Act policies.
We need answers from you that are not secret meetings or quickly put together legislation. We need a group of people willing to work together and talk to the experts to understand this. How long did you fight the Obama administration about the Affordable Care Act? It took the Obama administration 18 months to pass legislation for the Affordable Care Act. That was because the senate wasn’t satisfied with how it worked.
The American Healthcare Act is going to bring us back to where we were prior to 2009. To high risk pool, market instability and raising hospital costs. It was a system already failing. The AHCA will make it worse.
Many of your constituents are speaking up about this. It doesn’t matter who builds the best healthcare if the system works and the senate allows it to remain funded and functional.
Are you willing to take the time to listen?
Obama did.
Sincerely,
A Very Concerned Constituent.
