Monthly Archives: September 2017

Republicans in the U.S. Senate have just over a week, until Sept. 30, to pass an Obamacare repeal bill with a bare majority (instead of 60 votes). But in the rush of whip counts and CBO scores, don’t forget: This is an incredibly dangerous debate for Republicans. The public, through a variety of poll results, has made plain that it doesn’t like what the GOP is doing.

The latest YouGov poll, for example, found that 38 percent of respondents picked Democrats as the party that would do “a better job handling the problem of health care”; 24 percent picked Republicans. The Affordable Care Act, meanwhile, has a positive net favorable rating, and the various GOP repeal-and-replace bills have generally polled terribly.
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Medicare currently has over 58 million beneficiaries. That means there are about 250 million Americans who are not Medicare beneficiaries. If they were all enrolled in Medicare, and Medicare’s administrative costs remained constant, that would result in an increase in total administrative costs of at least $12.5 billion per year – not a savings of $500 billion, as Sanders claimed.

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Only in government does modestly slowing spending growth mean severe “cuts.” Opponents of the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson (GCHJ) proposal to change ObamaCare falsely claim that it will result in massive spending cuts, especially in Medicaid. That simply is not true.

The bill does not spend fewer dollars. In fact, under this bill, taxpayers will spend more over the next 10 years than they are spending right now. The “severe” change being referenced in almost every news story is a reduction in the rate of growth. Some ObamaCare supporters have even claimed that Congress will be unable to afford the GCHJ block grants.
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The Trump administration plans to shut down healthcare.gov, a website consumers use to sign up for the Affordable Care Act, for 12 hours on nearly every Sunday of the coming ACA enrollment season.

The outages, which the administration says are for maintenance, will occur from midnight through noon on every Sunday other than Dec. 10. This year’s enrollment season, which the administration has shortened to half the length of previous years, will run from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15 for states that use the federal marketplace.
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Conspicuously absent from most commentary arguing that Kansas should expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is any discussion about the program actually improving the health of recipients. Instead, we are left with terribly materialistic arguments about forgone federal money. Why is it that on the biggest policy questions facing Kansas, such as Medicaid or education, we hear lots about money spent and little about health outcomes or student achievement?
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Democrats claim to have a monopoly on caring for the poor and suffering, and this week the left is portraying a GOP health-care bill as an attack on society’s vulnerable. So check out the data on how ObamaCare is a tax on some low-income families.

IRS data offers insight into who paid the law’s individual mandate penalty in 2015 for not buying health insurance, the latest year for which figures are available. Spoiler alert: The payers aren’t Warren Buffett or any of the other wealthy folks Democrats say they want to tax. More than one in three of taxed households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.
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With time running short, the authors of the latest plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act shifted money in the bill to Alaska and Maine, which are represented by Republican senators who appear reluctant to support it.

The revised version of the bill, written by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, would provide extra money for an unnamed “high-spending low-density state,” a last-minute change seemingly aimed at Alaska and its holdout Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, who has yet to say how she will vote. It would also send money toward Maine, whose Republican senator, Susan Collins, had said earlier on Sunday that she would almost certainly vote no.
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John McCain is an American war hero with many political accomplishments. That legacy, though will be diminished by not one but two decisions to kill Republican health-care reform. And no one should let Senator Rand Paul off the hook, either.

Mr. McCain said in a Friday statement that he “cannot in good conscience” vote for a proposal from Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy that would devolve ObamaCare funding to the states, as well as repeal the medical-device tax and the employer and individual mandates. The deadline to pass the bill with 51 votes is Sept. 30 thanks to arcane Senate budget procedures. Mr. McCain’s no vote almost certainly dooms the project, as Mr. Paul has already declared his opposition and Susan Collins of Maine is thought to be a reliable no vote as well.

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The last train is leaving Reconciliation Station. Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare — derailed just weeks ago — now seem back on track. GOP senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Cassidy M.D., of Louisiana, Dean Heller of Nevada, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin seek 47 more votes (including, if necessary, that of Vice President Mike Pence, to break a 50–50 tie) to pass their legislation within the Senate’s filibuster-proof reconciliation window. It closes September 30. Having snored through August, Republicans are scrambling to keep the repeal/replacement pledges that secured them the House, Senate, and White House.

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