New Report Outlines What’s at Stake for Florida Health Care as Presidential Primary Looms

Repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Championed by Every Republican Candidate, Would Devastate Health Care Gains in Florida

Millions of Floridians Would See Negative Impact

Washington, D.C.—Prospective primary voters in Florida may be studying Republican presidential candidates to try to find differences, but a report released today instead reveals what the candidates have in common: They have all endorsed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and they all support drastic changes to Medicaid and Medicare.

If allowed to be implemented, these changes represent major reversals in national progress toward ensuring that all citizens in this nation have access to affordable health coverage. Their proposals would undo almost 50 years of health coverage progress and would affect all Floridians—old, young, and working-age—as health coverage protections are eliminated, and as prescription drugs, preventive care, and coverage itself becomes less affordable.

Floridians should be aware that repeal of the Affordable Care Act would mean:

• Florida’s 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries would no longer be eligible for free preventive services, such as mammograms and colonoscopies. Nearly three-quarters of beneficiaries (73.4 percent) took advantage of this benefit for at least one free preventive service between January and November 2011.
  
  
• Instead of diminishing through rebates and ultimately disappearing, the infamous Medicare Part D “doughnut hole”—the huge gap in prescription drug coverage—would grow. About 256,000 Floridians received a rebate check for prescription drugs in 2010, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. In 2011, a similar number received even larger discounts, an average of $563 per person through just October, while in the doughnut hole. 
  
  
• Insurance companies could again deny health coverage for children with a pre-existing condition, a practice now prohibited. Nearly 245,000 children in Florida have been diagnosed with a pre-existing condition like asthma or diabetes that could have resulted in denial of coverage in the individual market prior to reform.
  
  
• Insurance companies could continue to deny coverage in the individual market for people in Florida between the ages of 18 and 64. Beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act makes such denials illegal, a reform that will benefit nearly three in five Floridians, about 3 million people, who have been diagnosed with a pre-existing condition. 
  
  
• Women would continue to pay higher premiums than men. In Florida, every one of the best-selling individual market plans—100 percent—currently charges a 40-year-old, non-smoking woman higher premiums than a 40-year-old, non-smoking man. Gender rating will be made illegal in 2014 unless the Affordable Care Act is repealed.
  
  
• Lower- and middle-income individuals and families would lose tax cuts to help pay for health care premiums. Under the law, nearly 2 million people in Florida will be eligible for these premium tax cuts in 2014.

The list of bad outcomes from the repeal of health reform goes on: losing the opportunity to purchase coverage like Congress has, the re-establishment of lifetime and annual caps on benefits, the freedom of health insurers to spend benefits on almost anything besides health care, and the loss of a standardized right to appeal coverage decisions.

“Returning our health care system to a ‘Wild West’ market run by health insurers would take away important new rights and benefits gained by Florida’s families under the Affordable Care Act,” Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, said today. “Making cuts to Medicaid and ending Medicare as we know it makes things for people of Florida even worse, yanking coverage from Florida families in economic distress and putting health coverage out of economic reach for many Florida seniors.

“The Republican candidates never talk about real benefits to Florida families under Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, and they offer nothing positive in the way of replacing the benefits they would take away from hard-working families in Florida,” Pollack said.

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Families USA is the national organization for health care consumers. It is nonprofit and nonpartisan and advocates for high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans.

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