Here’s a new one: “Many people were happy” before Obamacare, when their pre-existing health problems kept them from getting private insurance. That’s what Republican Tom Cotton said, anyway, in Tuesday’s debate with Sen. Mark Pryor in the Arkansas Senate race. Cotton said that the previous coverage for these folks, high-risk pools set up in some of the states, was better than insurance bought on the exchanges.
“Many people were happy with their coverage under the high-risk pool, before it was eliminated,” Cotton said. “They should have been allowed to keep that choice.”
Pryor shot back, saying his personal experience proved otherwise. “I am a cancer survivor,” he said. “I have been in the high-risk pool. I have lived there. It is no place for any Arkansan to be. If we go back to the high-risk pool, it’s like throwing sick people to the wolves.” […]
As Pryor noted in the debate, before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, “people in Arkansas with pre-existing conditions were routinely denied access to coverage. They were one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. The insurance companies had all the power. I think that it would be a mistake to go back to those days.” He then accused Cotton of having “no answer” for what would happen to such people were the nation to “start over” on health care reform—as Cotton has repeatedly advocated.
Cotton is an unabashed Obamcare repealer, who insists that the law must be undone. That includes no longer making insurance companies cover all comers, even the sick ones. Where some Republicans have tried to finesse that particular issue, insisting that they will preserve that provision, Cotton is happy to throw people, as Pryor says, back to the wolves.
The pre-existing insurance pools Cotton wants to go back to were voluntary by states, so they weren’t available to everyone in the country. Most states had them, according to the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans, but not all. But in those states where they existed, they were extremely expensive for many enrollees, and often limited what would be covered. Think Progress notes that, in Arkansas, “out of pocket costs for patients in such pools could be as high as $20,000 and those with pre-existing conditions had an average 6 month waiting period for care.”
That’s what Cotton thinks people were happy with pre-Obamacare, so that’s why he says repel isn’t any big problem for the previously uninsurable.
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As for all the new people in Arkansas who finally have coverage—240,000 of them—Cotton has has no answer, literally. The moderator tried to get one out of him in the debate, he refused to answer.
