Proposed ACA Replacement

Today several Republican Senators proposed a partial replacement of the Affordable Care Act. This bill being called the Patient Freedom Act would allow states to opt to stay with the Affordable Care Act or receive similar amounts of Federal money which consumers could use to pay for health insurance or medical care.  The purpose of the bill would be to give that power to the states of how to deal with health care and insurance.

This bill would also create health plans that provide essential coverage.  These plans would be similar to a current high deductible health plan, however, lack coverage of some significant benefits covered currently.  For example, only generic drugs would be covered. The intention of these plans would be to decrease premiums drastically, but along with that comes reduced benefits.

The new high-deductible plans being created are intended on protecting consumers from catastrophic claims.  We saw some small insurance carriers try to do this when the ACA was first established, however, many of them ended up dropping those plans.  The idea would be to let people automatically enroll through a passive enrollment.  If someone wanted to, they could opt out, but what the Senators are trying to do is eliminate any remnants of an “exchange.” With the ability to opt out the Senators included in the bill the removal of the individual mandate.  This said that everyone must have health insurance or you would be required to pay a tax penalty.  Another removal would be the requirement for large employers to offer coverage to full-time employees.

If the Patient Freedom Act were to go into law we would see many similarities of the regulations that the ACA brought on.  Children would still be able to stay on their parent's plan until the age of 26, insurers could not impose annual or lifetime maximum benefits, and preexisting conditions would not disqualify you from insurance. 

Republicans are trying to fast-track a replacement to the ACA.  However, this would mark at least the 3rd proposed replacement this month.  If anything were to happen, it is almost certain that no effects would be felt until 2018 and most likely 2019.