The Hillary Clinton health care plans stands by the Affordable Care Act, but also proposes some ways to expand the policy to more Americans.
Some of the ways she intends to do so include lowering the costs of copays and deductibles, expanding Medicaid to insure more low-income Americans, ensuring accessible health care plans for undocumented families, and expanding access to affordable reproductive health care.
Essentially, her intended goal is to cut costs, and improve the overall quality of coverage offered under the Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as Obamacare.
What will “Hillarycare” look like?
At a campaign rally in Elko, Nevada, Clinton told the crowd, “You know, before it was called Obamacare it was called Hillarycare,” NPR reports. Clinton has proposed some expansive changes to Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which the president signed in 2010 to offer a federal insurance option to all Americans.
Millions of people received coverage via the ACA was enacted, but the health care plan did not extend to the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Clinton’s healthcare plan aims to change that, but she noted that “it is not going to apply to people who are in need of subsidies in order to afford that,” and suggested that the details of health care coverage for undocumented people will have to be considered alongside immigration reform.
Clinton also suggested creating a public option for coverage at the state level by working with “interested governors, using current flexibility under the Affordable Care Act, to empower states to establish a public option choice.” Her plan would also seek to expand coverage to low-income families by offering a $5,000 tax credit to cover out-of-pocket costs, and would ensure that families are covered, even if a member of the family is able to receive employer-paid insurance.
The latter provision would seek to mend what is known as the “family glitch,” which currently makes it so that if one family member is eligible for insurance through an employer, all other members of the family then become ineligible for the federal option. According to the Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan research organization, changing this provision in line with Clinton’s vision could extend subsidized insurance to another 4.7 million Americans.
Costs of Clinton’s proposals
“On a very personal, self-interested basis, you should have health insurance to protect yourself and your families from unpredictable costs that none of us know will be striking whenever,” Clinton told a crowd at a Florida rally back in 2014. So how will she increase the number of American families who have access to affordable coverage?
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Like GOP nominee Donald Trump, Clinton has previously suggested a need for competition in the insurance market, albeit via an entirely different method.
Trump has suggested the repeal of Obamacare, the deregulation of the insurance industry and the ability of providers to sell insurance across state lines.
Clinton’s plan, meanwhile, is to re-establish the aforementioned “public option” and provide competition to the insurance industry through a government-run insurance choice. In sum, the goal is to make coverage more affordable by increasing competition within the private insurance industry by implementing a strong public alternative.
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There isn’t too much available information that offers a cost breakdown of Clinton’s proposed platform. Still, the Rand Corporation study found that her “public option” provision, meant to lower costs and expand the number of insured people, could cost between $3.9 and $8.9 billion over a ten-year period.
Takeaway
Overall, Clinton hopes to expand on the existing federal health care rather than completely overhaul and replace it. She hopes to make the current policy work for more people and avoid leaving people uninsured in a process that involves replacing the Affordable Care Act.
The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan research group, suggested that repealing Obamacare could result in 20 million Americans losing coverage and add as much as $353 billion to the U.S. budget deficit between now and 2025.
Her platform aims to increase coverage and lower medical costs through public options and lower out-of-pocket costs, while being cost-effective for the federal government.
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