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 Healthcare
Reform FAQ
The new healthcare
reform legislation provides many great
things to Georgia families. 95% of
Americans will soon have access to
quality, affordable healthcare,
including nearly 2 million Georgia
citizens. Since there are many questions
regarding the reform and how it will
benefit our state, please check out
these “Frequently Asked Questions”
regarding President Obama’s healthcare
reform below.
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Children
with pre-existing conditions will be
able to get health insurance. Never
again will insurance companies be
able to deny health insurance to a
child because of his or her health.
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Young
adults will be able to stay on their
parent’s insurance plan until their
26th birthday.
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It will be
illegal for insurance companies to
drop coverage when someone gets
sick, and lifetime caps or
restrictive annual limits on
benefits will be abolished.
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Small
businesses will get a tax credit of
up to 35% of premiums if they choose
to offer coverage.
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Healthcare
reform will lower prescription drug
costs for people with Medicare
benefits in the ‘donut hole',
provide better chronic care and
free preventive care, and extend
solvency for Medicare for another
nine years.
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Adults
with pre-existing conditions will be
able to buy affordable health
insurance (even if they were denied
in the past) through a “high risk”
pool. Eventually, all Americans will
be able to purchase regular
insurance regardless of pre-existing
conditions.
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New
private plans must cover
preventative care, with no
co-payments or deductibles.
Only if you make over $200,000
a year as an individual, or $250,000 as
a couple. Unearned income will have a
3.8% surcharge. The overwhelming
majority of Georgia’s citizens make less
than $200,000 a year and will not see an
income tax increase.
This year, seniors
reaching the Medicare “doughnut hole”
would get $250 to help pay their drug
costs. Next year, they would receive a
50% discount on the cost of
brand-name drugs in the doughnut hole.
Next year, Medicare will provide free
preventative care as well. In the next
few years, this hole will be eliminated.
Nothing in the
bill reduces Medicare benefits for
seniors. Rather than undermining
Medicare, this bill strengthens it. It
is estimated that up to 20 percent of
Medicare spending, as well as private
healthcare spending, goes to waste,
inefficiency, fraud, and unnecessary
procedures. It is this wasteful
spending that is targeted for
elimination in this bill.
This healthcare
reform improves benefits and extends the
life of the Medicare Trust Fund by nine
years. This bill strengthens and helps
to stabilize Medicare.
You won’t be
forced to buy health insurance. Those
who don’t make enough money to purchase
their own insurance will receive tax
credits in order to do so, and will
immediately have the peace of mind that
if they get sick, their medical costs
will be covered. Those who can afford
health insurance- but don’t purchase it-
will pay a surcharge on their income
taxes.
If you currently
have health insurance, your plan won’t
change.
Neither of these
will change, unless you or your employer
decides to change them.
Yes. Anyone who
claims otherwise is simply trying to
play politics. It is widely agreed upon
that the law is constitutional.
Healthcare reform
does not violate the Supremacy Clause of
the Constitution. Once Congress enacts
an individual mandate – in the form of a
fee on persons who can afford to buy
health insurance but refuse to do so
-- no state law can override that
mandate.
When people are
denied health procedures, it is called
“rationing”- and insurance companies do
it every day. Millions of Americans have
been denied coverage by their insurance
company for important medical
procedures.
This reform
prevents insurance companies from
denying health procedures when you get
sick, or cancelling your coverage when
it gets too expensive. Reform will
prevent rationing, and certainly not
make it worse.
Healthcare reform does not
create more expenses for small
businesses, but it helps to relieve the
burden of health care costs for those
businesses.
The status quo is
unsustainable for the small business
community – 60 percent of America's
uninsured, or 28 million people – are
small business owners, workers, and
their families. Insurance costs for
small businesses have increased 129
percent since 2000.
The bill provides
$40 billion in tax credits for small
businesses to help them offer coverage
to their employees and exempts 96
percent of all businesses from the
shared responsibility requirement.
We currently spend
more than $2 trillion dollars a year on
health care. Health insurance reform
will make a short-term investment of
roughly $100 billion a year to lower
costs and relieve the crushing financial
burden that is eating into family
budgets, forcing families into
bankruptcy, making it hard for
businesses to expand and grow, and
preventing the government from using
your tax dollars to create jobs, improve
education, rebuild our infrastructure.
Health insurance
reform would be fully paid for over 10
years, and it would not add one penny to
the deficit. In fact, it will lower the
deficit by slowing the rise of health
insurance premiums, which go up
substantially every year.
Healthcare reform
is fully paid for and does not add one
dime to the federal debt. In fact, a
recent Congressional Budget Office
estimate projects the bill will reduce
the federal deficit by $1.3 trillion
over 20 years-- $128 billion in the
first ten years and $1.2 trillion in the
second ten years.
Healthcare reform
is the most significant deficit
reduction measure passed in more than a
decade.
There is nothing
in the bill that enables federal dollars
to be utilized for abortions. Once
anti-abortion proponents had the
opportunity to examine the bill, they
realized that criticisms related to
abortion were unfounded. The bill has
been endorsed by the Catholic Health
Association, Association of Jesuit
Colleges and Universities, Faithful
America, and Evangelicals for Social
Action, and 360 other organizations. The
author of the Stupak Amendment voted for
the passage of the bill.
Technically, you
already do. As the system stands now,
people with no health insurance get
treatment at emergency rooms, which is
much more expensive than a regular
doctor’s visit. If those people don’t
pay their hospital bills, the charges
rise for those people who have health
insurance to offset this cost.
American families
with health insurance pay a hidden tax
of roughly $1000 for the cost of caring
for people without insurance. As more
Americans become insured, that hidden
tax will begin to disappear. Bringing
younger, healthier people into the
system will spread the risk. As more
Americans become covered, insurance
companies will compete for their
business. That will begin to lower
costs. And health insurance reform will
create stability and security for
everyone. If you lose or change jobs,
you will have the peace of mind of
knowing that you will always be able to
find an affordable health insurance
option for your family.
Simply put, with
lower healthcare costs, more people can
get health coverage for less money- and
everyone’s healthcare premiums will stop
increasing 30% every year as it does
now. These premiums will stabilize, and
decrease dramatically as healthcare
reform fully takes effect in a few
years.
Currently, it is
illegal for undocumented immigrants to
receive federal benefits. Healthcare
reform maintains current law, and
undocumented immigrants will not be able
to receive subsidies or participate in
the health insurance exchanges.
There is a
lot of misinformation regarding
healthcare reform, and we’d like to help
explain it. The Washington Post
has a great resource where you can find
out more information about how this will
affect you personally. Please check out
their
Healthcare
Calculator.
There's also a
wonderful flash video that explains the
state of Georgia's benefits under
healthcare reform. Check it out at
Organizing for
America.
Also, if you have
any questions you’d like explained, feel
free to email (Eric@GeorgiaDemocrat.org)
for answers.
Rep.
Kingston voted to repeal health care. Tell him to practice what he
preaches.
Dear
Friend,
Who would
have the audacity to vote for repealing affordable health care for 32
million Americans while gladly accepting generous, federally subsidized
insurance for themselves?
Your
representative — Rep. Kingston — along with 236 other congressional health
care hypocrites.
Over the
past two years, especially during the election season, Republicans and a
select few Democrats did everything they could to derail health care
reform. They fueled fears and misinformation, throwing around terms like
"socialist," "fascist," "government takeover," and of course "death
panels."
Now they've
fulfilled their campaign promise and voted for a full repeal. But what
most of them haven't done is given up the affordable, subsidized care that
they voted yesterday to deny so many of us.1
Call
out the health care hypocrisy. Click here and we will send a fax to Rep.
Kingston on your behalf, with the actual form he can submit to cancel his
federal health insurance.
The
hypocrisy of the health care repeal effort has known no bounds.
And
yesterday the health care hypocrites went all the way, voting to repeal
the entire health care bill — without offering alternatives, without
dialing back their anti-government rhetoric or changing the bill's
outrageous official title ("Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law
Act"), and without repealing the generous federal insurance benefits they
receive and have worked so hard to deny to others.
As
progressives, we value a system that helps Americans get the care they
need. And new polling indicates that the majority of Americans want to
keep or strengthen reforms that help provide affordable care.2
If Rep.
Kingston doesn't believe the federal government should play a role in that
— fine. But rather than voting to deny affordable care to millions of
Americans and allowing insurance companies to discriminate against
children on the basis of pre-existing conditions, he should practice what
he preaches and start by canceling his own federal care — care that you
and I pay for.
Repeal
proponents have long argued the wisdom and availability of private
insurance. So these representatives should have no trouble getting great
private health coverage from the insurance companies they've been
representing so well.
Tell
Rep. Kingston to practice what he preaches. Send him the form to cancel
his federal health insurance.
Thanks for
taking a stand against health care hypocrisy,
Elijah
Zarlin, Campaign Manager
CREDO
Action
1"Do
As I Say, Not As I Do: 97% Of House GOP Still Holding On To Their
Congressional Health Plans" Think Progress, January 18,
2011
2"Repealing
Progress" The Progress Report, January 18th, 2011
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""Whether
or not you have health insurance right now, the reforms we seek
will bring stability and security that you don't have today.
This isn't about politics. This is about people's lives.
This is about people's business. This is about our
future." -
President Barack Obama -
