It has been said that the Supreme Court could reveal its decision regarding the Affordable Care Act sometime this week. We know that the ACA, or “Obamacare”, is the way that the Obama administration currently, and in the future, plans to help Americans with health insurance. We know that Mitt Romney wants to repeal the ACA. What does Romney propose should replace it?
It is easy to see what President Barack Obama’s plans are in regards to health insurance and health care. You can go to the Healthcare.gov website to find out absolutely everything about it. There is a timeline that shows exactly when certain regulations got implemented, and shows what changes are planned for the next few years. This is where to go to find out more about the Affordable Care Act, and how it will affect you and your family.
President Barack Obama will be running for a second term as President of the United States. His opponent will be Mitt Romney, who has made it very clear that he intends to repeal or replace the entire Affordable Care Act with …. something else. What, exactly is Romney’s plan about what the ACA should be replaced with?
There is a section of Mitt Romney’s website that discusses health care. At the top, it says “Repeal and Replace Obamacare”. The first part of the website talks about what Mitt Romney considers to be “Obama’s failure”, which is, of course, the Affordable Care Act, (referred to as “Obamacare” on the Romney website). If you want to know what Romney wants to replace “Obamacare” with, you have to scroll about halfway down the website.
The remainder of the page discusses “Mitt’s Plan”. It starts with:
“On his first day in office, Mitt Romney will issue an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all fifty states. He will then work with Congress to repeal the full legislation as quickly as possible”.
Somewhere below that, there are three key points to Romney’s plan. He wants to “Restore State Leadership and Flexibility” to “Promote Free Markets and Fair Competition”, and to “Empower Consumer Choice”. There is about a paragraph of information under each of these points.
Part of his plan to “Promote Free Markets and Fair Competition” includes this: “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage”.
In plain English, this means that Romney doesn’t want to require insurers to cover people who have pre-existing conditions unless those people were lucky enough to have had continuous health insurance coverage. The thousands of Americans who lost their jobs, and lost their employer sponsored health insurance with it, lack “continuous coverage”. Romney’s plan doesn’t protect thousands of Americans from being discriminated against by insurance companies due to a pre-existing condition.
image by Vectorportal on Flickr