Montanans must fight for our health care

Congress is moving full speed ahead to pass legislation that will increase healthcare costs for hard-working Montanans and their families, cut coverage for seniors and kids, and gut protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions - all behind closed doors.

Yes, you read that right.

If the U.S. Senate passes legislation similar to their counterparts in the House, thousands of Montanans will lose healthcare coverage, thousands will face higher insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and still thousands more will be out of a job.

The bill passed in the House, the American Health Care Act, is first and foremost an age tax. If you are 50 or older, you’ll pay more just because of your age. This bill allows insurance companies to charge older Montanans up to five times more than everyone else for the same coverage.

You read that right as well - five times.

And it’s not just folks over 50 who will pay more. The AHCA hurts almost all middle-class families.

• According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, if you buy insurance on your own, your premiums will go up 15-20 percent in the first year alone.

• The bill eliminates protections for pre-existing conditions, so you could end up paying thousands of dollars more for insurance.

• It would gut Medicaid, so your child or your parent in a nursing home could lose their coverage.

• And while you and your family pay more, Congress will give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to millionaires and drug and insurance companies.

The Congressional Budget Office also concluded that 24 million Americans will be forced to live without health insurance if this bill passes. This includes more than 132,000 Montanans in the first few years alone.

It also threatens to reverse the bipartisan progress we have made in Montana to increase access to health care. I worked with Democrats and Republicans to pass a unique approach to Medicaid expansion, which led to a dramatic drop in the number of our friends and neighbors without insurance. Nearly 80,000 Montanans have gained access to health care through expansion and our uninsured rate has dropped from a staggering 20 percent in 2013 to 7 percent in 2016. Folks have finally started to receive the treatment they deserve.

This bill would decimate Medicaid, cutting Montana’s funding by $4.8 billion over the next decade, kick thousands of Montanans off their insurance, and blow a hole in our state’s budget if we choose to continue coverage - leaving taxpayers with the bill. And in addition to pulling $500 million a year from our economy, these changes could result in more than 10,000 Montanans losing their jobs.

We can all agree that health care is still too expensive. But this bill won’t fix it. It does nothing to solve the underlying causes of rising healthcare costs, like skyrocketing prescription drug prices. It only makes it worse by giving drug and insurance companies billions of dollars in tax breaks.

And now Republicans in the Senate are refusing to release details on their own bill, which is likely to mirror the AHCA. They may be the majority party in Congress, but they need to listen to the vast majority of Montanans and Americans, people who are at risk of increased healthcare costs and lost coverage because Republicans are more interested in catering to wealthy special interests.

The devastating impacts of these proposals are no secret. We’ve seen the numbers. It’s time for folks in Washington, D.C., to start working across the aisle, like we did here in Montana, and find meaningful solutions to actually increase the affordability and quality of health care across America instead of throwing millions of people off of insurance in order to line the pockets of millionaires and CEOs.

Anything less is unacceptable.