Dr. Carole Myers
Welcome to Health Connections, the show about people health and policy. I'm Dr Carol Myers. The Tennessee General Assembly reconvened on January 13. Today, we are airing part two of the annual legislative update recorded with Senator Richard Briggs. Today's topic is the affordability of health care. Part one of the update included a discussion on the status of the free standing mental health hospital in the Knoxville area, and an update on the opioid crisis in Tennessee. Let's move on to affordability, a top concern of voters, the problem of health care affordability is going to get even more acute in the next few weeks as we look at the health care subsidies, what is being discussed at the state level regarding people who will be directly affected by unaffordable premiums in the ACA marketplace. And then, let's talk about the secondary impact on other folks with health insurance and our rural hospitals.
Senator Richard Briggs
You know, I think that is an excellent topic, because everything we're hearing from Tennessee citizens is affordability already. We're seeing in the marketplace, before this subsidy issue came up, that it's being discussed in Congress right now, it looked like the premiums were going to go up about 25% which is substantial. The second issue that's now come up just recently is that Congress has not yet passed the subsidies for the lower income citizens to be able to purchase the insurance at the marketplace, and those without the subsidies, it could very well go up well over 100%. It'll double what they have to pay in order to purchase their insurance. And this really does become unaffordable for our low income citizens,
So that's a tragedy for the folks that will not be able to afford premiums on the marketplace, but there will be spillover effects that go much further. What about the rest of folks with insurance? And I'm concerned about our hospitals that are barely making it, that have very slim margins.
Really, every hospital in the state, except for us, purely private institution, is going to be affected by this. Because some of the people that have insurance now, they've been able to afford it, are not going to have insurance. They will not pay the premiums. They will not have insurance. So they're going to be showing up in the emergency rooms with no insurance. So this is just going to exacerbate the problem that we already have since we didn't expand Medicaid back several years ago - we're just going to have a larger number of uninsured patients that will be showing up into the emergency rooms for health care.
So that could also spill over to those with private pay insurance and the affordability of their premiums.
Look, there's no free meal. And what happens is, when people are coming in with no insurance, somebody has to pay for it, and then ultimately it's going to be the people that do have insurance that do have to pay for it. If you work for a company, rather than getting a pay raise, they're going to have to pay higher premiums to cover this escalating insurance cost, even for their companies. So there's there's no free meal with this, and it ends up getting paid for, and it gets paid for by the people that do have insurance through higher premiums and higher deductibles on their part.
