I loved the headline for Rep. Scott Tipton’s column (Herald, Jan. 22), “To Fix Health Care, Obamacare Must Go.” I’d say to fix health care, Tipton and others like him must go.
I’ve been emailing and phoning Tipton’s office for months, and although assured a personal response, I never did receive anything from him. At one point, his aide told me to look up the “Patient Empowerment Act” to learn about how great my new health care would be. I did.
I am self-employed with a pre-existing condition and on the individual market. Under the price plan that Tipton supports, there will be a $1,200 per-year tax credit to buy new insurance. Current premiums for a silver plan with a $5,000 deductible cost $1,500 per month and are more than most people’s mortgage payment!
For people making $40,000-$50,000 per year who find themselves actually needing to use their health insurance, it would cost $23,000 per year in premiums and a deductible without a subsidy. On Tipton’s plan, if you do struggle and try to make this monthly payment but miss even a single payment, you would have to wait a full 18 months to be covered again.
Premiums for health insurance have been rising steadily at 10 to 12 percent per year before the Affordable Care Act was in place. In fact, premiums have been going up for decades, so it wasn’t the ACA that caused the increase.
The ACA did guarantee us that we would not be turned down for insurance if we had been or already were sick. It allowed us to keep our adult children on our plans until age 26 and did not allow our coverage to be capped if we had major health issues.
It’s not perfect and could be tweaked, but if discarded, it would leave many of us with no way to access health care at all.
The Republicans have had eight years (and decades prior to that) to come up with a real plan and still have nothing worthwhile. If they really think it’s so great, maybe they should try it out for themselves first.
Melanie Kelly
Durango
Editor’s Note: The column, which originally appeared in The Denver Post, was written by Ken Buck, Mike Coffman, Doug Lamborn and Scott Tipton, Republican U.S. representatives from Colorado.
