American conservative leaders welcomed President Donald Trump’s tweet suggesting to Republicans that they immediately repeal Obamacare first and then work together to replace it later.
.. Cruz’s proposal would allow health insurers to sell plans that do not comply with all of Obamacare’s regulations. The senator says that selling plans that do not adhere to all of the Obamacare insurance regulations would allow Americans to opt for more flexible and affordable healthcare plans.
.. if on July 10 we don’t have agreement on a combined repeal and replace plan, we should immediately vote again on H.R. 3762, the December 2015 Obamacare repeal legislation that the Congress passed but President Obama vetoed.
.. “Those who do have private insurance have very, very high deductibles, which means, in effect, they don’t have any insurance,” DeMint continued. “Under the current situation, the private health insurance market will probably not exist in five years.”
.. Andy Roth, vice president of government affairs of Club for Growth, said the “most underreported story” during the Obamacare replacement controversy is that “moderate Republicans are very supportive of keeping in place large parts of Obamacare.”
Roth criticized GOP Senate leaders for protecting moderates by hiding behind the parliamentarian and claiming that individual is preventing them from fully repealing Obamacare. He said moderate Republicans have been telling voters they want to repeal Obamacare when they actually intend to keep it in place.
Shields and Brooks on the Senate health care bill unveiled, Trump’s tape clarification
Brooks: I favor using market mechanisms to redistribute wealth and reduce inequality.
Shields: The Democrats have to come up with what they are for, rather than what they are against.
Nancy Pelosi passed the Affordable Care Act and raised millions. She is the most effective leader ..
Brooks: After Trump leaves, will this be the new norm
Shields: Americans don’t believe that Trump is honest, trustworthy, knowledgeable, experience, or has right temperament.
The Blood on a Tax Cut
a cut of taxes that are painless to the small percentage of people who have to pay them — a 0.9 percent Medicare surtax, and 3.8 percent tax on net invested income for couples earning more than $250,000 a year.
.. And it’s not as if there’s been a great hue and cry to repeal those tax increases. “My wealthy clients barely noticed the taxes resulting from the Affordable Care Act and have not needed to make lifestyle adjustments,” wrote the Forbes contributor Carolyn McClanahan, a financial planner.
I bet if you asked rich people if they wanted to cut off health care for millions of their fellow citizens in exchange for a bit more money at the end of the year, most of them would say no, that’s crazy. Taxes don’t register among the top concerns of people, in poll after poll.
Why such a cruel bill, then?
.. “We’re talking about a great, great form of health care,” President Trump said at midweek, with all the conviction of someone peddling the fraud of Trump University.
And you have a Congress that was largely paid for by influential groups for whom tax cuts are the only reason to get out of bed in the morning. Still, we have a moment of rare consensus in this country: An overwhelming majority hates the Republican overhaul. No state in the union has voiced majority support.
The Good, the Bad, and the Senate Health-Care Bill
It is a function of some things they’ve come to prioritize about the individual health-insurance market and Medicaid, and some things they’ve learned about the intricacies of the Byrd rule and Senate procedural constraints.
.. After seven years of saying they want to repeal and replace Obamacare, congressional Republicans have been forced to confront the fact that many of them, perhaps most, actually don’t quite want to do that.
.. That doesn’t mean that most of them never did. The case for repeal was strongest in the three or four years between the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. As more time passes since the beginning of implementation three and a half years ago, and more people’s lives become intertwined with the program for good and bad, the case for addressing Obamacare’s immense deficiencies by repeal weakens
.. I still think it is very much the case that the cause of good policy (almost regardless of your priorities in health care) would be better served by a repeal and replacement, with appropriate transition measures, than by this sort of tinkering — you’d get more coverage, a better health-financing system, and a more appropriate role for government.
.. The president has been an additional unpredictable political constraint — as the more coherent of his musings on health care have all suggested he is not comfortable with repealing and replacing the law, or at least is unfamiliar with the tradeoffs involved and unhappy when he learns about them.
.. But another thing Republicans have learned in these six months is that Donald Trump is an exceptionally weak president, probably the weakest of their lifetimes, and he is likely to accept whatever they do. He’ll celebrate it, sitting himself front and center while they stand around him awkwardly. He’ll praise it wildly and inaccurately. And he’ll sign it — even if pretty soon thereafter, in the wake of bad press, he tries to distance himself from it on Twitter and calls them names.
.. It is pegged to a less comprehensive insurance model and will both cost less and leave more room for more variation in insurance design — though this obviously means it will be less valuable and helpful to some of the people now getting subsidies.
.. Where today, people newly covered by Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (who tend to be childless adults with relatively higher incomes than the non-expansion population) are funded by the federal government on much better terms than the traditional Medicaid population (which tends to include more women with children and people with even lower incomes), the Senate bill would gradually equalize funding for the two groups, effectively shifting Medicaid’s focus back to the most vulnerable of its beneficiaries.
.. the Senate bill would provide an income and age-based subsidy that would allow these lowest-income individuals to afford at least modest insurance coverage in the individual market.
.. the Senate bill as written would probably mean that Medicaid would cost the federal government about 30 percent more ten years from now than it does today (as opposed to about 65 percent more under current law), and would cover something like the same number of people at that point as today (as opposed to 10 million more under current law)
.. once states got their bearings about just how much it would allow them to do, we could see some genuinely different approaches to health-insurance regulation among the different states — with blue and red models, rural and urban approaches, and more and less competitive systems.
.. alters a portion of a broader pre-existing statute. But it is very broad. In its scope and structure, this redesigned waiver would be unlike anything else in American federalism — which also means we don’t know how it would work. Those of us inclined to look favorably upon a bottom-up, experimental mindset in policy design will be inclined to think the best of the possibilities here.
.. it looks like this provision would render any insurer who offers an individual-market plan that covers abortion in a given state ineligible to benefit from the stability fund in that state. It seems to me, though I can’t say I’m sure, that this would effectively mean that no insurance plans in the individual market would cover abortion. It could easily even mean that California, which has a state law requiring individual-market plans to cover elective abortion, would have to repeal that law or else forgo access to the stability fund.