Paul talks health care in roundtable setting
The Somerset stop was one of five on the day, along with
Paul, in his typical style as a liberty-minded policy wonk, advocating market-based ideas over big government, had a lot to say, both on his own and in reply to those at the table. Following are a selection of his statements from Monday's event:
--On Kentuckians without insurance under Affordable Care Act's individual mandate:
"If you do a survey and say, 'Why don't they have it?', 50 percent of them say they don't have it because it's too expensive. We have 50,000 people in
--"The main problem is this: (President
--"They call it 'adverse selection.' The people buying insurance are really sick and they really need it, and the young, healthy people are like, 'This is too expensive. I'm going to wait and get it after I get sick.' So everybody in the pool becomes very sick, and that's the 'death spiral' they've been talking about over Obamacare. Premiums have doubled."
--On his party's-backed health care plans that haven't been successful:
"One of the Republican plans that I didn't vote for had a
--"They put forth a plan, they call this 'insurance stabilization fund.' They're acknowledging that they're not going to get rid of the fundamental flaw of Obamacare, the adverse selection. They're just going to subsidize it by dumping this money in ... Look, you could do this for anything then. New cars are expensive; why don't we do a new car stabilization fund, in which we'll put
--Paul's idea on individuals joining an association, initially speaking to
"Instead of you buying insurance with your family, what if you join the
--On the opportunity to push forward a plan with free markets:
"Last week, I spoke to the president on Monday, then went to the
--"There are three things we don't have insurance on at all: LASIK surgery, contact lenses, and plastic surgery. Price goes down or stays stable every year. LASIK surgery went from
--In response to a question by
"If we as a state decide we want to give these people health insurance at no cost, we should say, 'The only way to do this is to double the state income tax.' But then you see the downside of it ... We go to a 12 percent state income tax, we get Medicaid for 400,000 new people who are able-bodied, and then what happens to business here in the state? I'm guessing some of them might go to
--"We're all alarmed at opioid use. ... You know what the no. 1 corollary to where the drug problem is? Medicaid expansion. If you look at a map of
--"The battle's not over with the insurance. I think it's going to go on. I do think that it's going to get worse over the next six months, the Obamacare, because of the death spiral in the individual market, where insurers are leaving and quitting selling insurance ... I think the price is going to continue to go up through the roof and something is going to happen. ... I think they're going to do just the bailout of the insurance companies, and I don't think it fixes any of the problems. ... I think there's going to be enough
--In response to a question from
"The answer really isn't ultimately having everybody on Medicaid -- if you were 100 percent Medicaid, you would lose money, and wouldn't be able to survive. We end up having a skewed perception. Everybody wants to help people ... so we'll give everybody Medicaid, but really what we want to have is everyone on private insurance. We want them to have a job and private insurance. So we need to figure out what our goal is, which direction we're going."
--After talking with Judge-Executive
"That's 95 percent of people working, but it's really not quite that good, because you don't count the people who have fallen out of the work force. They talk about the overall job participation rate, it's like 62 percent for the country. We've got a problem in
--"I think we can take care of our poor, but traditionally the poor have been 5-10 percent, at the most, of the public. The poor aren't supposed to be 30, 40, 50 percent. You're not defining what 'poor' is accurately if half of your community is poor."
--"You've got a fork in the road. We can go toward what made America great, or we can go toward what made
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