'Crawl through broken glass': Experts warn US health care system just blew up

Changes being proposed to Obamacare will cause high-risk Americans to “crawl through broken glass” for healthcare coverage, according to a New York Times report.

Reporters Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz wrote, “The bill’s changes to the marketplaces can be thought of in three large categories.”

The first change would impose “additional paperwork requirements, the bill would make it harder to sign up for insurance and qualify for tax credits," the report claimed. This additional paperwork would include income verification.

The Times claims this would mean, “People who can’t easily prove their income is correct would not receive subsidies, with no grace period.”

Second, the reporters noted, “the bill would make Obamacare more expensive for many patients.” There are multiple proposals which could change the cost of the health insurance program, including having insurers cover “a smaller share of medical costs.”

Another would require people to pay the government back if they mistakenly report a lower income when applying to the program.

“Third,” Kliff and Sanger-Katz said, “the bill would block many legal immigrants, including refugees and those on student visas, from using government subsidies.”

“This bill poses a seriously existential threat to the future of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces in a way that we haven’t seen since 2017,” Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, told the Times.

The outlet reported, “Obamacare enrollment is at a record high.”

While healthy people might pass on the health care, Corlette believes, “People who are high-risk, high-need are going to crawl through broken glass.”

She added, “It’s the healthy, young folks who are going to say: ‘Oh man, forget it. I’m going to go uninsured.’”

The reporters claim healthy people forgoing coverage could have a bigger effect on insurance as a whole, “The loss of younger, healthier enrollees could unsettle entire marketplaces, potentially driving up the cost of insurance and discouraging some insurers from participating.”