Obamacare Facts: Republican Alternative to the ACA is Better For Millennials

In the preceding weeks, Republicans have pushed against Obamacare and suggested an alternative. Public sentiment is on their side. Polls show Americans have an increasing aversion to Obamacare and are concerned about how it will affect them. Unfortunately, Obamacare is particularly harmful for members of the millennial generation.

Last week, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) put forward a sensible, innovative, and compassionate alternative to Obamacare. Titled “The American Health Care Reform Act” and accompanied by the twitter hashtag #ABetterWay, this proposal would solve the problems Obamacare created and ignored.

The Problem

In May, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius wrote a blog on health care.gov, addressing the class of 2013. Sebelius writes that young people will be glad to know Obamacare ensures free birth control. Birth control is the least of millennials’ problems and to suggest otherwise is to belittle millennials. Birth control has been affordable and accessible long before Obamacare.

Sebelius giving free birth control to millennials is much like a salesman giving a customer’s child candy. Doing so simply appeases the child momentarily while the salesman sells the customer an overpriced, broken, doomed-to-fail car, or, in this case, skyrocketing health care costs.

Millennials don’t need free birth control and unaffordable care. They need jobs and a functional health care system. Obamacare is conducive to neither. In the past six years, millennial employment rates have dropped more drastically than those of any other age group. Obamacare is on track to worsen the situation.

Companies are lying off workers, cutting hours, and firing employees, because Obamacare crushes businesses by implementing oppressive mandates. If they did not have health care before Obamacare, millennials can thank the law for their newfound unemployment. Millennials need to remember that when unemployment rises, it hits them hardest.

Worse yet, health insurance companies are benefiting, their executives are receiving high government positions, and they are coordinating with the White House and nonprofits to spend your money to make you believe Obamacare is flawless. Without pricing mechanisms like a free market, and with government on their side, health insurance companies can and will charge you as much as they like.

Obamacare exempts the elite — congressmen, Capitol Hill staffers, and big business — from having to opt into the law. This raises a logical question: If Obamacare is so great, why are Democrats exempting their elite friends? Numerous Democrats who passed the bill have backtracked and admitted that Obamacare is a disaster. Others, like labor unions, are also outraged at how terribly the law has come to function.

The Solution

The Republican Study Committee (RSC) recently released an Obamacare alternative. The American Health Care Reform Act would repeal Obamacare, thereby cutting billions in taxes and thousands of pages of impossible regulations. In stark contrast to Obamacare, this proposal is funded by tax deductions, not increases.

It embraces free markets as a way to lower costs. Americans could purchase insurance across state lines. Smaller groups could “pool together” to achieve the same “buying power as large corporations.” Other pools would ensure people with preexisting conditions receive good coverage.

The act would treat patients compassionately by expanding the definition of preventative medicine, preventing harms caused to patients by bureaucracy, and incentivizing healthy behavior. It would also make health care transparent by creating portals to provide information on various plans and providers.

The act would help stop “defensive medicine,” a widely condemned but commonplace practice used by doctors in which they perform extra and unnecessary tests on patients solely to avoid lawsuits. Its effects boil down to exponentially higher health care costs and distorted medical standards.

Finally, it would stop government from getting between you and your doctor by removing any possibility of health care rationing. It goes so far as to expressly state, “Nothing in this act shall be construed to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship or the practice of medicine.”

Obamacare is hurting jobs and health care, increasing cronyism, and millennials are suffering most. Conversely, RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act puts no unsustainable burdens on employers, meaning it won’t increase unemployment and hurt millennials. Lower costs means millennials can buy their own health care. The RSC’s plan is the opposite of a piece of candy and an overpriced, doomed-to-fail car.