Ross: What happens if we get No-bamacare?
Dec 18, 2018, 7:45 AM
(File, Associated Press)
(File, Associated Press)
The Texas court ruling to vaporize Obamacare will soon be working its way to the Supreme Court. For now nothing has changed – except the value of a bunch of health care stocks.
But a conservative Supreme Court could very well let it die, in which case President Trump’s plan is to ask Democrats to help him fix it. Now the Democrats might be willing to give him a big win like that right before an election. But if they’re not, there is one obvious question. I posed it to Julie Rovner at Kaiser Health news: what if Obamacare actually does disappear?
“Basically, the federal government would lose all its authority to regulate most of what it does in health care,” Rovner said. “It would be a giant mess.”
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So we would then go back to the free market, where competition will obviously force health care prices down — just like what was happening before the Affordable Care Act. Right?
“But then you’d have 75 million people on Medicare and Medicaid who would be unable to get care,” Rovner argues.
Hospitals, of course, would still have to care for these people. They can’t turn sick people away. Can they?
“That’s a myth,” Rovner said. “Hospitals don’t have to take care of sick people. They have to stabilize people who show up with life-threatening emergencies, or women in active labor. That’s the only federal requirement.”
So, for example, if you get cancer, hospitals don’t have to give you chemotherapy if you can’t afford it.
“Nope,” Rovner said.
That would be a “nope.”
I thought you ought to hear that, so that if you do not have a job or are not especially wealthy – you might consider, if it’s at all possible, having that major illness sooner rather than later.
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