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Vail Daily letter: Sure don’t like Obamacare

Possible thoughts from a reasonably well-informed, hypothetical 72-year-old man or woman …

YEP, sure don’t like that Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). Why? So many reasons, just don’t know where to start and certainly not in a letter of less than 1,500 words. But there are a “couple” of good points that every political group’s plan surely would contain:

Y: Young people staying on their parents health policy till age 26 — especially for my granddaughter just graduating with her degree in ancient Greek history and not yet finding a job on top of her $30,000 student loan to pay off.



E: Everyone showing up at an emergency room having some insurance policy — as my local hospital is just about staying afloat having to subsidize so many uninsured young people, like my grandson who “never gets sick or injured,” until he got deathly sick at 2 a.m. in the morning.

P: Pre-existing conditions not being a reason to be turned down or with outrageously high premiums for kids and adults — especially for my newborn grandchild with a heart condition and my 44-year-old, Type 1 diabetic son.

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Now that I think about it, there a “couple” more “Ps” in my YEP acronym:

P: Preventive trips to the doctor — as all the data I read about shows, it is cost effective in the long run and it sure would have helped my niece if she had been screened for skin cancer earlier.

P: Premium assistance and age cap protection — especially for my 55-year-old, healthy nephew whose job does not cover insurance and his premium keeps going up as he ages way beyond the Obamacare to be in force cap of a reasonable 2-3 times that of a younger person.

P: Prescription drug cover as one of the available benefits available through the enroll-online insurance exchanges — that would surely help my grand niece with expensive anti-rejection medications following her liver transplant.

And I almost forgot, there are Obama Care benefits for us seniors, adding another “P” in the YEP acronym:

P: Partial closing now, going to full closing in about six years of the “donut hole” in Medicare “D” prescription drug plan (President George W. Bush added this to the original Medicare) — the donut hole costs my spouse and I about $3,000 per year and the gradual closing of my copay percent is just about offset by the drug company’s annual cost increases.

YEP (plus four additional “P’s”), other than the above “couple” of items, I sure am against that Obamacare. And of course, do not muck with my Medicare as a whole and Social Security — especially my annual cost of living adjustments. And finally, our government is just too big and gets too involved with our lives.

Paul Rondeau

Vail


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