Rep. Jerry Knirk: Enduring a broken health-care system

Bill Marvel’s recent column “Enduring Obamacare” nicely summarized the major problem of Obamacare. However, I think a better title would have been “Enduring a broken health-care system.” The Affordable Care Act helped millions of people who never before had insurance become covered. But a small group, the 4 percent of the insured people who buy their coverage on the individual market place but do not receive subsidies, is facing staggering increases in health-care premiums and deductibles, as Bill pointed out.

We have a patchwork quilt of coverage in the United States, with Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Veterans Affairs, individual insurance and employer-sponsored insurance. The multiple systems all function differently with different benefits and formularies.  Making sense of this morass is a burden for the consumer and a major problem for the providers that have to deal with multiple different coverage plans and requirements. Prior to the ACA, many people who needed to buy insurance individually simply were not able to buy it due to pre-existing conditions, or they purchased plans which did not give adequate coverage when they really needed it. Uninsured individuals still have health-care needs. Costs generated by care of the uninsured when they go to the emergency room for accidents and chronic illness crises do not disappear but instead are shifted to people who have insurance and to the taxpayer as uncompensated care costs. Providing appropriate universal coverage lessens health-care costs as conditions will be treated at the appropriate time in the appropriate place. The ACA enabled millions of people to gain insurance coverage, leading to decreased uncompensated care costs.