Hint: killing Grandma with government death panels isn't included.
1. Insurance companies may no longer deny customers because of preexisting conditions or pull coverage back when people get sick.
2. But you can't just do that for free. If you are going to ban preexisting conditions, then everyone would just wait till they got sick, get insurance, and bankrupt the system. So everyone has to purchase health insurance if they dont already get it through their work.
3. But lots of people couldn't afford that. So you subsidize the insurance for people who can't afford it based on their income.
4. To pay for the subsidies, you take fraud and waste out of Medicare, restructure some service delivery in better ways, and tax people making over $200,000 per year.
5. People seeking to buy insurance currently have to deal with a really byzantine system. It's near-impossible to cross-shop equal plans. So, you set up an Insurance Exchange in each state, with minimum standards of what insurance is, so that people can cross-shop based on price and insurance companies are given incentives to be efficient so they can have lower prices to offer to consumers.
End result: $1 trillion off the deficit, 32 million people get health care.
1. Insurance companies may no longer deny customers because of preexisting conditions or pull coverage back when people get sick.
2. But you can't just do that for free. If you are going to ban preexisting conditions, then everyone would just wait till they got sick, get insurance, and bankrupt the system. So everyone has to purchase health insurance if they dont already get it through their work.
3. But lots of people couldn't afford that. So you subsidize the insurance for people who can't afford it based on their income.
4. To pay for the subsidies, you take fraud and waste out of Medicare, restructure some service delivery in better ways, and tax people making over $200,000 per year.
5. People seeking to buy insurance currently have to deal with a really byzantine system. It's near-impossible to cross-shop equal plans. So, you set up an Insurance Exchange in each state, with minimum standards of what insurance is, so that people can cross-shop based on price and insurance companies are given incentives to be efficient so they can have lower prices to offer to consumers.
End result: $1 trillion off the deficit, 32 million people get health care.