Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pressing to get both a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate and a vote before Congress’ July 4 recess.
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Some of Obamacare’s taxes could also be repealed later when Congress tackles new legislation overhauling the US tax code, two current Senate aides said.
Republicans were pretty mad about the process that produced the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, under president Barack Obama. And as University of MI law professor Nicholas Bagley argues, that could have untold other consequences: The lack of scrutiny and debate could lead to major, destructive flaws in the bill itself and, more broadly, could further erode basic norms of legislative transparency.
Needless to say, this made for a political mess for the Democrats, who were attacked by the insurance industry and Republicans alike for some of the ideas in the bill. However, when they brought out what they claimed was a new bill and had it immediately passed in the House without waiting for an analysis, it turned out Trumpcare 2.0 was virtually the same as its predecessor. The wrecking squad works in the shadows knowing that if the public were given time to absorb the damage in store for millions of Americans, the pushback would be enormous.
The meeting in question was a gathering among Trump and a group of Republican senators involved in crafting their chamber’s version of a bill to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act. That resulted in more than $49 million in Medicaid spending.
The Senate plan reportedly maintains the AHCA’s per capita cap or block granting of federal Medicaid funds, which would effectively end Medicaid as a guaranteed program based on need.
Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress, writes in the Washington Post that maintaining the waivers for essential benefits will have the effect of denying coverage for people with preexisting conditions.
Why all the secrecy? So far, Susan Collins of ME has stood honorably as one of her party’s firmest skeptics of this fiasco-in-the-making, but even she seems to be wobbling.
Only a small group of senators know what is in the bill.
But Price also told Schatz that “my knowledge about those conversations” that senators are having as they draft their bill “is what your knowledge is, what you read in the newspaper”. They are asking so they can tell Americans, the senators’ constituents, what is in a bill that will affect their lives. But reporters aren’t asking about the health care bill because they are busybodies or disrespectful. One GOP senator related that Trump “talked about the need to take care of people”. Disruption in the face of this violation of legislative norms is no vice. The appeal, inherited by the Trump administration, has been put on hold.
The report from the Office of the Actuary, a nonpartisan economic unit at the Health and Human Services Department, was released earlier this week with little fanfare.
However, that 10-year window has been a problem in the context of the current Congress, because the Republicans, despite controlling both the House and Senate, have pinned all of their hopes for tax cuts and a major overhaul of the health care system (which involves even more tax cuts) on budget reconciliation bills that can get through the Senate with a simple majority.
In fact, we do not even know if it is going to be a new bill.
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“What we’re beginning is an effort to say to the media, ‘Don’t allow the tweets to distract you from the actual Trump agenda, ‘ which is to gut Medicaid, take $800 billion in tax breaks, and give them to the wealthiest people in our country”, Markey said.
