Rep. Ryan Discusses Health Care and Tax Reform with Rock and Walworth County Residents
Yesterday,
Excerpts of Ryan's answers to constituents follow:
On health care reform:
"What's happened here with [Obamacare], in the last few years, is fewer and fewer people who consider themselves healthy are buying the insurance, so the bulk of the people that are left are people that have to have insurance because they have health care costs, health care problems, issues, and that is cranking up the [cost] of health care. They call it a death spiral . . . which means sicker people are joining the pool and fewer healthier people are buying it because the prices are getting so high. And therefore the pool is getting more and more expensive and they are having to raise premiums and prices, and it's basically kind of collapsing."
"So what's happening is health insurance companies are pulling out of the marketplace. That is a serious problem. And so our approach says: Don't force the younger healthier person to pay a lot more to cross subsidize the sicker person, because there obviously they are not doing that. Let's have risk pools instead."
"So if we subsidize the cost of care to that one to five percent of the people in this marketplace, [what] you end up doing is dramatically lowering the cost of care for everybody else, because the insurance doesn't have to guard against that potential catastrophic cost. And that lets everybody else get cheaper premiums. It [gives] the younger healthier person, who we want to buy into the insurance pool, the ability it buy at a price they can afford. What we're trying to do is get more competition, more choices, and more insurers into the marketplace."
On tax reform:
"
"For individuals, we propose a dramatic simplification of the tax code. Keep deductions for things like mortgages and charities, but get rid of the other deductions and increase the standard deduction so that people have a bigger standard deduction for families, for kids, for filing as a single person or couple. And by doing that, we can fill out our taxes on a postcard."
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"Let's just take
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