Gather your FACTS!
http://acasignups.net/17/01/14/update-dead-pool-paul-ryans-aca-replacement-hinges-concentrating-those-wpre-existing
Detailed, and math-y, but it is essential to understand that what Ryan wants, is a form of health coverage apartheid. Segregate the ruinously expensive people with major health care needs (cancer patients, let's say) away from everybody else. Please read this, it can open your eyes as to what they are doing. Pay very close attention to the fact that this will happen at the state level, by deliberate design.
"For the most part, Ryan's response focused heavily on High Risk Pools. And, to his credit, he was pretty damned blunt about exactly what the Republican philosophy is when it comes to those with expensive pre-existing conditions: Treat them like lepers. Seriously. Watch the clip above again; he stresses at least 3-4 times how vitally important it is to separate out cancer patients (or really, anyone with a highly expensive ailment) into a separate High Risk Pool in order to lower the price for everyone else. Then, you provide a hunk of money to cover those people without "ruining it for everyone else".
Now it's true that once you isolate/quarantine high-expense patients from the rest of the poulation, the cost to treat everyone else does drop significantly...except there's a few problems with this:
First, it still costs just as much to treat the high risk people. Splitting them off hasn't magically made their conditions any less expensive to treat. So the total amount of money to treat everyone is exactly the same, just split up differently. Where does that money come from?
Well, Ryan is proposing a $25 billion risk pool fund over a 10 year period. That sounds like a lot, but it only averages $2.5 billion per year (I presume it's less the first few years, more later on via inflation). According to this article by Ian Milhiser at Think Progress, to adequately cover 875,000 high-risk patients would have cost seven billion per year...and that was in 2008. That's 2.8x as much as Ryan is proposing, and that was 9 years ago (10, if we assume the new plan doesn't go into effect until 2018). I have to imagine that $7B would be up to at least $10B by then, and that's for 875,000 patients.
Now, they want to kick up to 30 million people off their policies (I'm not even going to get into the remaining ~28 million uninsured). According to this study by the Kaiser Family Foundation about High Risk Pools (HRPs), 5% of the general population accounts for fully 50% of total healthcare spending, with the other 95% costing the other 50%:"
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