The House bill contained a fatal flaw. Its flat tax credits would price millions of near-elderly low-income workers out of the insurance market and trap millions more in poverty. Fortunately, buried in the House bill was a way out. Section 202 of the bill contains a transitional schedule of tax credits that was meant to serve as a bridge between the old Obamacare system and the new Paul Ryan system. If you simply kept that bridge in force, and got rid of the flat tax credit, you’d solve the problem with the House bill. By making that change, the near-elderly working poor would be able to afford coverage, and the poverty trap would be eliminated. And that’s precisely what the Senate bill did! Section 102 of the Senate bill—the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017—closely mirrors Section 202 of the House bill, with age- and means-tested tax credits up to 350% of the Federal Poverty Level.
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