House Republicans revealed the long-awaited health care bill that replaces the Affordable Care Act (ACA) established by Obamacare. The new legislation takes a leap of a shift from income-based considerations, with potentially dire consequences for many.
Professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Gerard Anderson, revealed to Newsweek in an interview the good and bad of the new American Health Care Act. He said that the new health care bill would "take money away from the poorest and gives it to the more affluent," at the rationale that "everybody should receive the same benefit regardless of their financial ability to pay."
What's certain is that the new health care bill definitely affects people who currently purchase insurance through the health care exchange set up by the ACA. Because the subsidies are income-based as of now, the subsidy they would receive from AHCA will decrease, especially for low-income Americans.
Knowing that health insurance is very expensive, poor people will likely not afford to pay the premium, leaving them without insurance. That's unlike the upper to a middle class that probably have the money to pay the premium, and might do better under the new health care bill, AHCA than under the ACA.
Meanwhile, someone who is 64 and still employed in the employment category won't experience much change from the new health care bill. But people who are no longer employed and not yet eligible for Medicare will be required to purchase insurance through the private market, according to the House's official website.
Fortunately, the people who are affluent and older will excel in these exchanges because the subsidy will be quite good. Those who are poor and elderly will do well under the new health care bill, but not as much as they would have, under the ACA, because they lose the subsidy based on income level.
Overall, it seems like the low-income Americans are the one most severely impacted by the new health care bill. Anderson said that AHCA, in that sense, does not seem to make that much of a difference, and probably only make things worse for them.
