It’s not a big deal at all that the House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare and gut Medicaid and kick at least 24 million people off of health insurance without finding out what it might do to the budget or the economy. Don’t bet on it. The media celebrated it as the progressive answer to the Tea Party movement, but it soon disappeared.
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State officials, the health industry and Democrats in Congress have pushed for the payments to continue, saying that ending them would upend the insurance market and cost millions of people their health insurance. “It does a narrow change to the bill”.
Since the policy implications and the consequences involved in this decision have been clear for a long time, you have to figure the “delay” is a thinly veiled effort to mess with Obamacare without admitting it.
-Continued protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions and sustained federal funding to offset the cost of care for the sickest patients. “Instead of undermining our health-care system, three-quarters of Americans want the president to make the Affordable Care Act work”. That would impact older Americans more due to their higher risk for complications from pre-existing conditions. Many of them, however, provide comprehensive coverage that includes many of these benefits. They would pay a 30 percent late enrollment penalty for one year before the premium drops back to the standard rate paid by everyone else. This means that subsidies that help more than 7 million low-income Americans afford health care can continue in the meantime.
-Significant federal funding to subsidize premiums and out-of-pocket costs.
Put another way, the idea of Congress setting aside money for the CSRs – making the ruling moot – is still on the table and thus a delay in a formal ruling was needed. That depends on how many people end up in the pool.
“Next week we will start to coalesce around a strategy”.
With the addition of the MacArthur amendment, AHCA lets states opt-out of certain provisions of Obamacare through waivers. What exactly is wrong with that? Some of the hardest hit states would be Republican-leaning ones that didn’t expand Medicaid under the law, because they have more low-income people enrolled in Obamacare plans, Kaiser found.
If you are having chest pains or you just sliced your hand open while carving a chicken, you can go to almost any hospital with an emergency department, and under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) the staff is obligated to conduct a medical exam to see if you need emergency care.
Granted it’s always challenging for out-of-touch journalists and TV media personalities to appreciate what real people care about, but if Americans didn’t give much credence to Trump’s alleged snub of Gold Star father Kizr Khan last August, what makes the talkers believe that any of this recent turmoil is going to sway the people now? Without those subsidies, experts say, premiums could jump about 20 percent in 2018.
At the same time, other Republican candidates in borderline districts could plead, “Hey, I’ll be an independent Republican like Charlie Dent and vote my conscience”. Indeed, if they had a credible proposal to actually improve ObamaCare, they could probably peel off enough Democrats to pass it.
The House passed its version this month, but not without difficulty, and now Republicans who run the Senate are finding hurdles, too. In the general election campaign, Trump continued his weird strategy against the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
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Joseph Antos is a resident scholar and Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at AEI.
