Health care reform major topic at Rep. Johnson town hall meeting
"If everybody had a brand new Cadillac in the driveway that'd be great but if you can't afford to put gasoline in the tank, it doesn't do you a whole lot of good. It just sits there."
Representative Mike Johnson described the state of America's health care at Thursday's town hall meeting in Leesville. Johnson said while Obamacare has had some benefit, it's also been detrimental, listing a couple statistics. He said just this year, 83 insurance companies have left the Obamacare marketplace, adding that 41 percent of counties in the U.S. have one insurance provider left. Johnson says the 'doomsday' scenario is that come January, 50 counties in the U.S. will have no insurance providers. He says the solution is to reintroduce free market principals into the insurance market.
"So that these insurers don't pull out, take their marbles and go home. That doesn't benefit anybody," he explained. "We got to keep them in the marketplace so that consumers have more choices and we can pick a health care plan that works for us and our family, not some plan that's dictated by bureaucrats in Washington. They don't know what I need."
Johnson said in order to drive down premiums, he hopes the American Health Care Act will follow the state of Maine's model pre-Obamacare in which those with chronic illness, roughly 5 percent of the population, were put into a high-risk pool and their premiums subsidized by the state to keep at a manageable level. Johnson said some of the other 95 percent saw a 35 percent decrease in premiums.
"In a year and a half's time, more citizens got health insurance overall and everybody's costs went down. It was a win-win-win...and we got it put it into the bill and I think that really is going to make a big difference. Again, it's not a theory. It's actually been proven, so hopefully that will stay in the Senate's plan.
Johnson said he was one of three members of the House to work with folks from Maine to draft something similar at the national level.