House Republicans recently unveiled guidelines for their ACA replacement plan via a policy brief. One Republican idea for lowering monthly health insurance premiums for the individuals who must purchase insurance on their own is to reinstate state-based high-risk pools, according to an NPR report.
Here are three arguments for and against the idea, as reported by NPR.
1. Opponents of high-risk pools argue such pools that operated prior to the ACA were too costly for patients, state taxpayers, people with employer-based health insurance and others who subsidized health plans, according to the report.
2. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) is a proponent of high-risk pools, which would move people with serious and expensive medical conditions from the average pools into publicly funded insurance pools. "By having taxpayers, I think, step up and focus on, through risk pools, subsidizing care for people with catastrophic illnesses, those losses don't have to be covered by everybody else [buying insurance], and we stabilize their plans," House Speaker Ryan said on public television's Charlie Rose show in January, according to NPR.
3. Stefan Gildemeister, an economist with Minnesota's health department, spoke out against high-risk pools. According to the report, he said: "It's not cheap coverage to the individual, and it's not cheap coverage to the system."
For more on this story, read Mark Zdechlik's full report here.