I have to ask why Paulsen and the Republicans keep focusing on the 5 percent of the Affordable Care Act that has a problem, the individual market. What about the 95 percent that works? Millions of people who never had health care now get preventive care. Otherwise, they would present themselves in emergency rooms with acute illnesses, and many would die who didn’t need to.
The problem with the ACA is that not enough healthy people pay into it. Insurance works because everybody pays, even when you’re healthy, and then insurance pays when you get sick. This seems to be the thing that the Republicans hate. They don’t want people to be forced to pay for health insurance. Well, then, where is the money going to come from? It’s going to come from well people anyway through higher costs to hospitals for treating uninsured sick people, or to taxpayers. The bottom line is that under the American Health Care Act, fewer people will have health care, and we’ll still end up paying for them, only we’ll pay more. That’s not a good solution. Fix the ACA, don’t trash it. Also, look at all of the data, don’t just cherry-pick the data you like.
Martin Masters, Shoreview
Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 10, 2017