The Senate health care bill will block more from buying insurance

Republican-led health reform, declared dead at least twice this year, has arisen once again and could very well pass after July 4. Long cloaked in secrecy, the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act was made public last Thursday. The act offers someone like me, a longtime health insurance observer and analyst and a former health insurance counselor, plenty to talk about. I’ll focus here on a sampling of policies in the draft act and how they could change access to care for the millions of people who need to buy their own health insurance from a state or federal exchange.

Each of these provisions, if passed alone, would likely result in more people uninsured and in — including 7 million more uninsured people on an individual exchange by 2018. The changes would reintroduce challenges faced by individuals before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, struggles I observed while providing health insurance counseling and support.