US House Speaker Ryan pitches new health plan, cites Utah as good example
(KUTV) House Speaker Paul Ryan used a PowerPoint presentation to pitch his plant to replace the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare.
In his presentation, he said Utah had a good plan in place before Obamacare. His plan proposes going back to something similar in place of Obamacare.
“They had a good risk pool insurance system in Utah and Washington State. All those are gone under Obamacare,” he said.
Risk pool plans separate the healthy people from the sick people -- with pre-existing conditions -- because sick people cost more to insure.
Ryan wants to give federal dollars to states so they can form their own risk pools and give funds to the people who are sick so they can afford to pay for costly premiums.
Jason Stevenson of the Utah Health Policy Project, which helped thousand sign up for insurance through ACA, thinks Ryan’s plan to go back to risk pools is a bad one.
He said Utah’s risk pool plan didn’t work in the past because it was too expensive and many people who were sick could not afford it.
Stevenson said only 3,000 people signed up for Utah’s risk pool plan while 200,000 Utahns are signed up for insurance through Obamacare.
Utah’s past high risk pool plan had many limitations too," he said. People with pre-existing conditions had to wait six months before using their coverage. Pregnant women had a 10 month waiting period before they had any coverage for them or their baby.
“The measure of success for a program is how many people it helps and if you are only covering 3,000 people and leaving tens of thousands uninsured, I don’t think that’s a good thing to go back to,” he said.
