A think tank run by Millennials, a term for the generation born between 1980 and the mid-1990s, has published a proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with market-based reforms that would lower costs and increase options for patients.
Charlie Katebi, a coauthor of the proposal and fellow in health care reform at the Millennial Policy Center (MPC), presented the plan on June 7 in Arlington Heights, Illinois at the Andrew Breitbart Freedom Center—located at the headquarters of The Heartland Institute, which publishes Health Care News.
ACA has disproportionately harmed Millennials by causing sharp increases in health insurance premiums and health care costs while causing a decline in competition and patient choices, write the authors of “Revitalizing Healthcare in America,” MPC’s first Policy Paper, released in March.
The authors propose expanding access to health savings accounts, subsidizing health insurance for high-risk individuals—making it easier for non-employees to buy group health insurance—and several other reforms.
Employers Choose, Workers Lose?
Katebi says the established employer-sponsored health insurance system prevents workers from making their own health care decisions.
“A big problem is that workers don’t really have choices over their health benefits,” Katebi said. “It’s their boss that makes those decisions. They decide the benefits you can access, the medications you can access, and the doctor you can see.”
Millennials must speak up if they want to change laws that restrict their ability to make life choices, Katebi says.
“Millennials are sort of a unique group or generation in that an enormous amount of policies affect us but we have actually very little sway over these policies,” Katebi said. “Until we got the Millennial Policy Center, we really didn’t have many groups speaking on our behalf in these policy discussions.”
Arianna Wilkerson ([email protected]) is a marketing coordinator at The Heartland Institute.
Internet Info:
Juliana Darrow, Charlie Katebi, Dr. Michael T. Parra, and Jimmy Sengenberger, “Revitalizing Healthcare in America,” Policy Paper, Millennial Policy Center, March 15, 2017: http://www.millennialpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MPC_PolicyPaper_Revitalizing_Healthcare_in_America.pdf
Millennial Policy Center is a project of the Liberty Day Institute: http://www.libertyday.org
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