Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Graves: Obamacare is not how health care should work in America

(From Sixth District Congressman Sam Graves)

Last week, 50 million Americans found out their healthcare costs will go up by more than 25% in 2017. Although this is reason to worry for everyone affected, it’s not surprising to anybody who’s paid attention to Obamacare since it became law.

The administration has failed to deliver on so many of the promises President Obama made before Obamacare was pushed through Congress in the middle of the night. You can’t keep the plan you liked. Your healthcare costs haven’t gone down. And you don’t have more options than you did before.

In fact, one third of the country may have just one single healthcare plan to choose from on the Obamacare exchanges next year. That’s 100 million Americans who will be paying more for a plan they are forced to pick.

Competition is one of the keys to affordable, quality health care. But one of the many problems with Obamacare is that the co-ops it established in order to increase competition with insurance companies did just the opposite.

The free market doesn’t work when the government artificially props up businesses that can’t compete on their own. Today, only six of those 23 co-ops are still operating.

This is not how health care should work in America. It was clear to many of us when Obamacare was rushed into law, but it’s even clearer now. It is time to scrap this law and start over with market-driven solutions that rely less on top-down mandates from the federal government and more on honest, transparent reforms that make sense for every American. Please know that I will continue to work towards that goal as your Representative.

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