Will the Republican health plan make care cheaper?

Senate Republican leaders say they'll unveil details of their health care bill on Thursday after writing it in secret with little input from other GOP members.

Senators on both sides of the aisle are skeptical about what the bill might include.

So what's ahead for American health care?

"No one knows exactly what's in the Senate bill yet," professor and director of health policy research at George Washington University, Leighton Ku said. "Our best guess is based on what the House passed. And the Congressional Budget Office said nationwide about 23 million people would lose health insurance by 2026 [under the new plan]."

Dr. Kavita Patel, nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and Johns Hopkins physician, said the new health care rules mean big changes to Medicaid.

One of the new rules includes giving states the power to make decisions about what services people on Medicaid can and cannot get.

"It translates to fewer people getting healthcare," Patel said. "It means that people are going to be running to not just emergency rooms, but we're going to have clinics where people are going to them that are much sicker than they need to be because they're not getting care when they need to."

There have been hopes that the AHCA would fix some of the problems not addressed or made worse by Obamacare. But when it comes to high deductibles, Patel said that consumers shouldn't expect things to improve.

"That really gets to the heart of this issue, which is rising costs," Patel explained.

According to Patel, the Republican bill is not comprehensive enough to really address the problems of high costs, nor are the writers looking at what drives up costs.

The reason for that? Republicans are using an unusual work-around to pass this legislation.

"They are doing this through what is called a budget reconciliation process which basically means you only have to get 51 votes ... this is not technically a repeal of the entire Affordable Care Act. It's just the parts that deal with the budget."

Leighton Ku said there are some relatively modest fixes to Obamacare that could be made to improve the cost of healthcare.

"Part of the reason that plans have been dropping out is in fact because those reinsurance programs were designed as being temporary and then sort of lost funding over time," Ku explained. "And people have not been willing to bring those back.These are the kinds of modest fixes that could be made to help stem some of the problems that have been discussed...Deductibles are huge for some people. Prices keep going up. Some insurers are pulling out. There are modest fixes that I think could be done on a bipartisan basis. It's regrettable that that has not been part of the discussion."

Patel points out that there's a history to the reinsurance programs.

"There actually was a reinsurance program," Patel said. "The cost of those programs were so high that it actually forced the administration to no longer make those payments. So a lot of these mechanisms to 'fix things' were in place. But the cost exceeded what people estimated."

Bottom line: the costs of health care will continue to rise.

"The baby boomers are getting older ... technology continues to progress," Ku added. "We can kind of do things to make it more affordable, relatively speaking, but healthcare costs will go up one way or the other."

Patel thinks one of the best things concerned citizens can do in terms of improving American health care is really communicate their needs to lawmakers.

"Start talking to people about what's in your healthcare and what you value. [Ask] our elected officials to talk about how that is going to be carried forward," Patel continued.

Use the audio player above to hear the full segment.