compromise bill, worked out over several weeks of negotiations between two Republicans: Mark Meadows, a North Carolinian and the head of the right-wing Freedom Caucus; and Tom MacArthur, a New Jerseyan who is co-chair of the Tuesday Group
.. The compromise negotiations laid bare the simple dynamics of health care among Republicans: every action to add votes on the right loses votes in the center.
.. Dent also opposes how the compromise bill would allow states to deregulate insurance markets to allow insurers to deny coverage to people with preëxisting medical conditions. The preëxisting-conditions provision was a core part of Obamacare, and it was one of the few provisions of the law that Trump and Republican leaders promised to retain.
.. And, if the bill were to change in the Senate, there’s a possibility that the Freedom Caucus will abandon the effort all over again.
.. in the Senate, where, among both Republicans and Democrats, the Freedom Caucus is held in low regard.
.. If Obamacare repeal officially dies, Dent said that Trump has one other option: “Start over, deal with health care from the center out, and work with some Democrats.”
Living in the Trump Zone
The reason I use scare quotes here is that the single-page document the White House circulated this week bore no resemblance to what people normally mean when they talk about a tax plan. True, a few tax rates were mentioned — but nothing was said about the income thresholds at which these rates apply.
.. Meanwhile, the document said something about eliminating tax breaks, but didn’t say which. For example, would the tax exemption for 401(k) retirement accounts be preserved?
.. So if you were looking for a document that you could use to estimate, even roughly, how much a given individual would end up paying, sorry.
.. Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.
Trumpcare 2.0: It’s Even Worse Than the Original
The new version would further tighten the screws on vulnerable Americans by letting insurance companies charge older people and people with pre-existing conditions much higher premiums than they charge younger and healthier people. It would also give insurers the freedom not to cover essential health services like maternity care and cancer treatment.
.. The premium for a 40-year-old earning $30,000 living in Chattanooga, Tenn., would increase by $3,000 under the bill, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
.. The AARP says that 40 percent of those between the ages of 50 and 64, or about 25 million people, have the kinds of pre-existing medical conditions that would put them at risk of losing affordable health insurance under the House bill.
.. Republican lawmakers claim that states could help anybody hurt by their bill by creating high-risk pools with the help of federal grants. But this is a disingenuous argument. Many states operated high-risk pools before the A.C.A., but they ran up large losses and benefited few people.
.. A recent Pew poll found that 60 percent of people say that the government has a responsibility to make sure everybody has health care.
GOP Health-Care Push Falls Short Again
House Republicans fail to round up enough votes to pass legislation before Trump’s 100-day mark
GOP lawmakers’ hopes had risen this week when Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.) introduced an amendment that won over many of the House’s most conservative Republicans.
.. “Protections for those with pre-existing conditions without contingency and affordable access to coverage for every American remain my priorities for advancing health-care reform, and this bill does not satisfy those benchmarks for me,”
.. The bill also would significantly cut spending for Medicaid, a major concern of centrist Republicans in both the House and Senate.
.. With federal waivers, states could let insurers charge higher premiums to some people with pre-existing conditions. That would apply only to people who had let their coverage lapse, a measure that aims to ensure people stay insured. And the higher premiums would generally only last for about 12 months before decreasing.
.. House leaders had argued that GOP lawmakers in tight races next year would benefit from having kept their repeated campaign pledges to repeal the ACA.
“We promised that we would do this,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) said Thursday. “If you violate your promise, if you commit the sin of hypocrisy in politics, that’s the greater risk, I think, to a person’s seat.”