Fox’s resident quack anti-vaxxer radiologist Dr. Nicole Saphier said the quiet part out loud during a discussion about the ACA subsidies going away and what Republicans’ so-called solutions are to keep the price of health insurance down.
Here’s Saphier and her cohosts Tomi Lahren and Joey Jones pining for the days when preexisting conditions weren’t covered and people were forced onto junk high deductible plans instead, and insisting that going back to those days would be a good thing on this Sunday’s The Big Weekend Show:
SAPHIER: I don’t know about that but I will say something I don’t usually say. I agree with Hakeem Jeffries a little bit in what he said. He is right, and as Joey just alluded, the Affordable Care Act did help millions of Americans, but it also tied even more Americans and their physicians to Washington, and what that did was it over-regulated our health care system and that drove up the costs.
And so what we saw when the ACA was enacted in 2010, you know, we had the thumbs down by John McCain with the repeal in about 2017, and then 2021, 2022 under Biden’s American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, they expanded all of the subsidies. They said more people were able to get these tax credits, these tax incentives to get on the marketplace.
And so what the Republicans are saying is we need to claw that back. More people are getting it than maybe they should be having. And the reason that insurance has gotten so expensive is because under these ACA plans, they require coverage for so many things.
They require that preexisting conditions are entirely paid for. You don’t pay more if you have a lot of chronic medical conditions. You pay the same as your healthy counterpart. So it’s cost sharing, and that really is a stretch of socialized medicine.
Now, when the president is tweeting out, put the money back in Americans’ pockets, he is not saying to disband all health insurance, okay? So people on social media, calm down. That’s not what he’s saying at all, actually.
He’s saying roll back the regulation on the Affordable Care Act. And that’s what Republicans, I guarantee, are focusing on right now. Start funding those pre-tax dollar HSA accounts.
Right now, HSA accounts can’t actually be used towards paying for your health insurance. In the big, one big beautiful bill, they actually have said they’re going to expand the HSAs being able to pay for some health insurance, including catastrophic plans.
A lot of people would benefit from these low deductible, low cost catastrophic plans, and if they had more pre-tax dollars than their HSA, you can now separate primary care and routine services from emergency and chronic care.
And that is what needs to do. And that is how you’re going to drive down costs, you’re going to increase care, and Americans are going to have more of a choice.
JONES: The problem is how much this has to be changed through legislation and more the likelihood of that, especially right now before the midterms. And that is the problem. And that’s why the Trump administration does such a good job at is finding ways they can be effective while Congress isn’t.
LAHREN: Yeah. They gotta do something though, because they’ve been promising the alternative for a few years now, I think, so we gotta’ get on it. Maybe Dr. Nicole can consult. That’s what I’d like to see.
