Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said Friday that to repeal the Affordable Care Act means it is time to “roll up our sleeves” and work on measures to improve the health law.
Hickenlooper’s comments came during an interview with National Public Radio. Hours earlier, Democrats and three Republicans in the U.S. Senate joined together for rolling back the ACA, also known as Obamacare. .
“I don’t think itap a time for celebration; itap a time to roll up our sleeves,” Hickenlooper .
“What we’ve got to do now is say … ‘How can we get Republicans and Democrats to work together and make the system better?’ ”
Leaders of local health care advocacy groups echoed that thought later on Friday in a call with reporters.
“I don’t think anybody thinks we’re done,” said Elisabeth Arenales, the director of the health policy program at the Colorado Center on Law and Policy. “We have the federal budget conversation coming up, and Medicaid is still very much at risk. We still have a lot of work to do to shore up the individual market.”
Still, the advocates expressed relief that Congress’ latest repeal plan had failed. Adela Flores-Brennan, the executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, said critics of the ACA had correctly identified one of its problems — rising costs in the individual insurance market that make plans increasingly burdensome.
“The answer, the response to that,” she said of the GOP plans, “was to devise proposals that had no hope of achieving better affordability.”
She urged lawmakers to work together to fix issues in the law that both parties agree exist.
In his NPR interview, Hickenlooper identified several problems he sees with the current health insurance law, including relatively lower enrollment rates by young, healthy people and the presence in insurance pools of seriously sick patients whose care drives up costs for everyone else. He suggested that the seriously ill could perhaps be covered separately through what is known as a high-risk pool — something Colorado with mixed results — or that the government could give extra money to insurance companies to help shoulder the cost of the most expensive beneficiaries.
Hickenlooper also spoke of possibly reducing the benefits that plans are required to offer everybody. He gave the example of women in their 50s having to pay for maternity coverage, “which they don’t need.”
“In many cases they don’t make a big difference in terms of cost,” Hickenlooper said. “But I think itap time to sit down and say, ‘Letap go through each one of those cases where people are having to pay for something they don’t need and make sure itap something they do need and how can we get that cost down to the lowest level for individuals?'”