title:  Paul Ryan Wants To Make This Healthcare Nightmare A Reality Again (VIDEO)
text: On Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan called for an end to protections found in the Affordable Care Act that prevent insurance companies from denying people coverage based on pre-existing conditions.Reuters reports that Ryan told students at Georgetown University that he is in favor of scrapping the protections found in the Affordable Care Act that prevent insurers from charging higher rates for sick people in favor of creating subsidized  risk pools  on a state level. Less than 10 percent of people under 65 are what we call people with pre-existing conditions, who are really kind of uninsurable,  Ryan said.  Let s fund risk pools at the state level to subsidize their coverage so that they can get affordable coverage,  he said.  You dramatically lower the price for everybody else. You make health insurance so much more affordable, so much more competitive and open up competition. Less than 10 percent of people under 65  is a deceptive way to describe approximately 26 million people. A report released in 2011 from the Department of Health and Human Services found that half of the U.S. population has some sort of preexisting condition. That study includes those who are aged 65-years or older. The term  preexisting condition  is broad and different studies can provide wildly different figures on the number of people who have a preexisting condition, depending on how the term is defined in the study.Support for the Affordable Healthcare Act as a whole has run mostly along partisan lines. Republicans strongly are in favor of scrapping President Obama s healthcare reforms altogether. However, out of all of the individual provisions found in the Affordable Care Act, protections for people with preexisting conditions have consistently received support from people in the U.S. across the political spectrum. A survey conducted in 2012, just before that year s presidential election, found that 82% of respondents supported provisions set in place to prevent insurance companies from denying people coverage based on preexisting conditions.That makes Ryan s choice to vocally oppose those protections a major political gamble. Ryan, along with the rest of the Republican Party has failed to offer any solid alternatives to the Affordable Care Act during their now nearly decade-long opposition to healthcare reform package. Republicans are stuck between a rock and a hard place when trying to define an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. With the exception of the individual mandate, polls show that people tend to support key aspects of the healthcare act than they do when asked if they support the act in its entirety.You can watch Ryan s speech in full below.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images)