The National Farmers Union (NFU) is urging Congress to vote against the American Health Care Act (AHCA).
The bill is scheduled to be voted on today by the House of Representatives.
NFU president Roger Johnson says the proposed legislation would have serious negative impacts on farmers’ and ranchers’ access to affordable health insurance coverage. Most troubling, he says, are the inclusion of a cap on Medicaid and the proposed system of basing premium subsidies on a person’s age, rather than their income.
“So as a consequence, you’re going to find a lot more farmers—older farmers—that are simply going to find that it’s unaffordable to carry health insurance anymore,” Johnson says.
NFU continues to favor a single-payer system, Johnson says.
“That’s the challenge that we’ve got. In this country, we just haven’t come to the place where, in our opinion, we need to be, which is you’ve got to have some sort of universal care that’s offered to everybody. And if you do, experience in the rest of the world would suggest we can cut our costs by about half of what they are across the whole medical system today.”
Johnson says under the Republicans’ proposal, fewer people will be covered, resulting in increased costs across the entire system.
Source: brownfieldagnews.com