The Trump administration has been very active recently regarding what it considers to be health care reform.
The administration has declared its support for making Obamacare’s pre-existing condition laws unconstitutional, and promoting private health care for veterans.
The latest step in this process came on Tuesday, when they signed laws that are intended to give small businesses and self-employed citizens more affordable health care in exchange for less coverage and fewer customer benefits. This is a step forward for the administration’s project to offer alternatives to the Affordable Care Act.
The new laws were announced by Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. These laws accomplish what congressional Republicans have attempted to achieve for the past two decades.
The reform was presented as a more just paying process, as the previous public health care rules were the same for both small and large companies, as well as for individuals.
Acosta claimed that new legislation would keep “consumer protection and health-care anti-discrimination that currently apply to large companies.”
The proposed laws exclude coverage that was previously mandatory, such as maternity care, prescription drugs, and mental health care.
President Donald Trump has spoken up regarding these new regulations, praising them and highlighting their potential benefits.
Using what has become familiar rhetoric for him, Trump stated:
“You are going to save massive amounts of money and have much better health care. It’s going to be fantastic. . . . You are going to save a fortune.”
The measure has been received very negatively by several politicians and health care officials, who claim that this act is another attempt by the Trump administration to repeal any legislation passed by President Obama.
Critics stated that this new legislation will most likely endanger its supposed beneficiaries, as it will leave them without the chance to receive immediate aid when they fall ill. The regulation could also seriously affect the healthcare industry, as citizens who suffer from pre-existing conditions will now be considered to be more ‘expensive’ to treat, and will thus be less likely to be covered by health insurance companies.
The legislation will be applied to services sold from September to April and, strangely enough, it will cover patients with pre-existing conditions, despite the fact that they will soon become unconstitutional.
Small businesses’ health care plans have usually been handled through the use of association health plans. Instead of dealing with this problem, the new regulations will expand the situations under which businesses can obtain association health plans, now giving them the opportunity to create an association merely for the purposes of obtaining said health care.
The new rules were proposed during January, and from early on they were faced with criticism.
Some argue that the new legislation will raise the costs of insurance premiums in 2019, which will cause several hundred thousand citizens to lose their coverage.
However, this legislation is not the last project that the Trump Administration intends regarding health care reforms. The administration is also looking to expand the Obama administration’s “short-term, limited duration plans” from three to twelve months.
This could be problematic, as these plans were usually purchased by those who are moving between jobs and this could allow for them to slow said process.
Featured Image via Wikimedia Commons
