As I noted Thursday, Rep. Paul Ryan‘s speech last week embracing the Patients’ Choice Act (PCA), completed the “replace” part of his call to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. While the details of Rep. Ryan’s plan differ for the various parts of the system, the overriding idea is moving toward a defined contribution from the federal government, instead of a commitment to providing a given level of insurance coverage, shifting costs to either individuals or states. The outline of Rep. Ryan’s overall “replace” plan is:
- Medicare (45 Million persons in 2011). No great changes for those now covered by Medicare, or who will be so covered in the next 10 years. However, for those who become eligible for Medicare more than 10 years from now, they would receive a voucher with which to purchase private health insurance. Eventually, Medicare as a government insurance plan would go away with the death of the last beneficiary, replaced by this system of private coverage.
- Medicaid (60 Million persons in 2011). Block grant the program to states, fixing the cost to the federal government and shifting the balance to the states.
These two policies were adopted in broad form (235-189) when the House of Representatives passed its Budget Resolution on April 15, 2011, and have been much discussed; I am not going to get into them (Austin has written a lot on the Medicare proposal). I am going to instead focus on the last part of Rep. Ryan’s replacement strategy, the Patients’ Choice Act, that would directly impact around two-thirds of the U.S. population almost immediately if passed:
- Privately insured (160 Million persons in 2011) and uninsured (50 Million persons in 2011). The Patients’ Choice Act represents Rep. Ryan’s vision for how health insurance would be remade for persons who are not elderly and not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. In short, the tax preference of employer paid insurance would be repealed, all persons/families would get the same tax credit with which to purchase private health insurance, either inside or outside of state-based exchanges. The premium levels are far below average premiums today, meaning they would finance only catastrophic levels of coverage. There are many details that need to be considered. I outlined some of them last week.
I am going to drill down on these details by going through several of the key Titles of the PCA over the next couple of weeks. However, the punch line for this analysis is clear regardless of what I think:
- the House Republicans need to mark up the PCA in committee (Commerce and Ways and Means for sure, perhaps Budget), pass the bill out of the relevant committees, and see what the CBO has to say about them.
Politically, it is an advantage to “have a plan” but not commit to the nitty gritty details. The PCA has been around for a while, having been introduced into the 111th Congress on May 20, 2009 but has never been scored by CBO since it did not see the light of day in the last Congress because the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. However, the Republicans have controlled it for the past 9 months, and there is nothing standing in their way of filling in the blanks, passing the PCA out of committee(s) and seeing what the CBO has to say. To paraphrase what a Little League umpire once told me, the PCA is nothing until CBO tells us what it is. Only then can the country understand the replace part of repeal and replace.
