The Senate Republican health-care bill would not repeal and replace Obamacare. The federal government would remain the chief regulator of health insurance. No state would be allowed to experiment with different models for protecting people with pre-existing conditions. Federal policy would continue to push people away from inexpensive catastrophic coverage. The bill also seems unlikely to stabilize insurance markets, even though their current instability is one of the main Republican talking points for passing it. The legislation gets rid of the “individual mandate” — Obamacare’s fines for not buying insurance — but keeps the regulations that made the mandate necessary. The result is likely to be that healthy people leave the market and sick people face much higher premiums.
.. From a conservative perspective, the chief selling point of the bill is Medicaid reform.
.. But the reform is delayed until after the 2024 presidential election.
.. We suspect that the Congressional Budget Office will find that most of the reduction in insurance rolls results from people’s choosing not to buy insurance when they’re not being threatened with fines.
.. The bill’s subsidies for people outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer-based insurance system could simply be given to the states to distribute to that population without having to comply with Obamacare’s regulations.
McConnell’s Calculation May Be That He Still Wins by Losing
When it comes to managing Republicans’ best interests, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, rarely loses. So it is possible that Mr. McConnell views the potential failure of a hastily written health care bill as an eventual boon.
.. As Democrats immediately took to the Senate floor to excoriate the bill and the secretive process in which it was put together, few Republicans, even those involved in crafting it, came to defend it.
.. Four others went further. Senators
all said they would not vote for the bill as currently proposed.
.. Mr. McConnell and many of his aides are also eager to get to the business of changing the tax code, which they view as less difficult than health care, and have been working with the White House behind the scenes to get that effort started. For Mr. McConnell, cutting taxes is a much higher priority than health care
I’ve covered Obamacare since day one. I’ve never seen lying and obstruction like this.
the process will lead to devastating results for millions of Americans who won’t know to speak up until after the damage is done.
.. potentially bringing lifetime limits back to employer-sponsored coverage, which could mean a death sentence for some chronically ill patients who exhaust their insurance benefits.
.. Senate Republicans do not appear to be focused on carefully crafting policy that reflects a more conservative, free market attempt at achieving President Donald Trump’s goals of covering every American at lower cost... They’re focused on passing something, by whatever means necessary... “There were hundreds of hearings and markups that lasted days — or in the case of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, months,” Rovner recalls in her piece... the bill had been amended to allow states to opt out of the requirement to charge people with preexisting conditions the same prices as healthy enrollees, a move that will almost certainly price some patients out of coverage... The White House has decided to deal with an unpopular bill by refusing to acknowledge the parts of it that the public doesn’t like. When asked in interviews about the expected loss in coverage or cuts to Medicaid, administration officials simply act as if they don’t exist.
Leahy to Sessions: ‘You can’t run forever’
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “You can’t run forever.”
“Atty Gen. Sessions provided false testimony in response to questions from me and @SenFranken about his contacts with Russian officials,” Leahy tweeted Saturday.
“Now, twice in 2 mos., AG Sessions cancels an Approps hg in which I could Q him about his false testimony and half-hearted Russia recusal,” the Democratic senator said in a subsequent tweet.“My mssg to AttyGen Sessions: Approps & Judiciary have oversight of DOJ. You need to testify before both in public. You can’t run forever,”.. Sessions was supposed to testify in front of the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees this week but said in a statement he would send Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to that hearing.Instead, Sessions will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating any ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.