Congress is scheduled to vote on the final health care bill in the next few days. (About time, right?!)
We took on this fight for health care reform because the status quo is broken and young people needed to be heard. The process hasn’t been smooth and we didn’t get everything we wanted, but the bill represents a significant step forward in fixing a terribly broken system.
Before the final vote, we thought it would be important to take stock of what’s in the bill:
1. Young people will be allowed to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until the age of 26. We fought for this and won and that means that 2 million more young people will have health insurance.
2. The bill ends the long-standing insurance industry practice of denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions and discriminating against women by charging higher premiums. Did you know that in some places pregnancy and even being the victim of domestic violence are considered “pre-existing conditions”? That will end.
3. If you aren’t getting insurance from your employer, there will be a transparent exchange (or marketplace) that will let you easily compare your options on the private market. These options will include low-cost catastrophic plans. There is no doubt that young people need a low-cost option for health insurance, but frankly we wish these plans were a better deal. We will continue to fight to improve them.
4. The bill provides subsidies for low- and moderate-income people to afford health insurance. So, for example, if you are a 22-year old making $20,000 a year, you would get $1,518 a year to buy a silver plan on the exchange, lowering your bill by $126 per month.
5. The bill extends Medicaid – the program that covers low-income people – coverage to millions of Americans, a disproportionate number of whom are young adults.
As an added bonus, student aid reform and a significant expansion of the Pell grant program will be part of the final package. These provisions will end wasteful government subsidies to banks and invest tens of billions of savings to help young people afford a college education and to strengthen our schools. All of this will happen while reducing the deficit, so that more debt doesn’t get passed onto our generation.
The bill isn’t perfect. But health care reform has been fought for since Teddy Roosevelt was president (over 100 years ago!). A vote is finally here. Some think the bill goes too far while others think it doesn’t go far enough. At the end of the day, the bill will expand coverage to 30 million Americans – including 10 million 18 to 29 year olds – and stop the insurance companies from engaging in the worst practices.
We think it is worth supporting. And all young people should keep fighting to make it better.
What do you think?
