The Commonwealth Fund has put out an analysis of the two presidential candidate’s health care plans and what the impacts would be.
The differences are stark:
Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic, assesses earlier studies (like that of Families USA) and attempts to understand the differences:
Here, again, is what Romney has proposed on health care.
1. Romney wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would bring Massachusetts-style reforms to the rest of the country and make insurance available to almost everyone.
2. He wants to hand Medicaid over to the states and then, in short order, dramatically reduce its funding.
3. He wants to change the tax treatment of company health benefits, in ways that could make it less available even to middle-class people in the long run.
These three changes—repeal of Obamacare, the end of Medicaid as we know it, and changes to the tax code—represent nothing short of a wholesale revolution in health care. (“Repeal and Reverse,” as Ed Kilgore likes to call it.) The changes would arguably more sweeping than the ones Obamacare will cause. They would inarguably be more cruel.
The best defense of this analysis is that the Romney plan doesn’t have enough details to make such calculations. In other words, don’t judge our plan, because we don’t have one. But ignore the impacts of repealing the Affordable Care Act, cutting and block-granting Medicaid, and turning Medicare into a voucher program.
Health Access California promotes quality, affordable health care for all Californians.