It is valuable to understand what would happen if AHCA in fact became law, and what could be done to improve it or a new reform proposal. The best place to start is with the cost estimate of the plan produced by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Some have criticized CBO for this estimate, arguing that it is a fundamentally inaccurate assessment. While some of CBO’s assumptions are indeed questionable, there is little doubt that the agency’s bottom line assessment is basically correct: The bill, as currently structured, would trigger a rise in premiums in the short-run, a sharp increase in the number of people without insurance over the next two years, and then also a steady increase in the number of uninsured Americans over the following eight years. Instead of trying to discredit this finding, the authors of the legislation would be better off fixing the bill. CBO’s estimate provides a roadmap for what needs to be done to improve the chances the bill will produce the results its authors intend.
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The conventional wisdom—repeated by President Trump—is that the right-wing House Freedom Caucus is singlehandedly blocking Republican attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare. In fact, Freedom Caucus members have been reaching out to the larger bloc of “no” votes—GOP moderates—to find a path forward. Moderates are rebuffing them. The contours of a deal exist that could satisfy the concerns of both the House Freedom Caucus and GOP pragmatists. They involve replacing the AHCA’s flat tax credit with a means-tested one that focuses on offering assistance to the working poor, and pairing that change with rolling back more of Obamacare’s premium-increasing insurance regulations. But members of the Tuesday Group, the countervailing faction of House GOP moderates, are saying no to any phone calls from members of the Freedom Caucus.
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White House officials presented an offer to the conservative House Freedom Caucus on Monday night as they seek to revive the ObamaCare replacement bill. Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials presented an idea to the Freedom Caucus meeting to allow states to choose to apply for waivers to repeal two ObamaCare regulations that conservatives argue are driving up premiums.
Those two regulations detail ObamaCare’s essential health benefits, which mandate which health services insurers must cover, and “community rating,” which prevents insurers from charging sick people higher premiums.
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Grace-Marie Turner tells One America News, “I am optimistic I see the speaker’s commitment, the president has said he’s going to do this- I think he publicly said he’s going to do this with the Republicans or I’m going to do this with the Democrats. Clearly, if the conservatives want to have more reform of Medicaid, more free market options for individuals, more control over the states to be able to approve the kind of plans that people actually want to buy, they need to move quickly before they wind up with more government controlled options which is very likely to happen if they have to put together a majority with half of them Democrats.”
President Trump expressed confidence Sunday that he and aides can resurrect their attempt to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Trump tweeted: “Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of ObamaCare is dead does not know the love and strength in R Party!”
He also tweeted: “Talks on Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare are, and have been, going on, and will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.”
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bamaCare architect Zeke Emanuel met with Trump administration officials at the White House on Thursday, a White House official confirmed.
The meeting, which was first reported by Vox, follows a sitdown between Emanuel, who advised former President Barack Obama on healthcare, and President Trump earlier this month.
After the collapse of the House Republican ObamaCare replacement bill last week, Trump said he thinks the health law will “explode” and Democrats will then come to the table for a deal.
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Now that House Republicans have squandered their shot at reordering Medicaid, governors who want conservative changes in the health program for low-income Americans must get special permission from the Trump administration.
Near the front of the line is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who not only supports work requirements and premium payments but also a new additional condition: to make applicants undergo a drug test if they’re suspected of substance abuse.
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Repeal-and-replace (for Obamacare) is not quite dead. It has been declared so, but what that means is that, for now, the president has (apparently) washed his hands of it and the House Republicans appear unable to reconcile their differences. Neither condition need be permanent. As Obamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all. Republicans will have one last chance to try to persuade the country to remain with a market-based system, preferably one encompassing all the provisions that, for procedural reasons, had been left out of their latest proposal. Don’t be surprised, however, if, in the end, single-payer wins out.
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The full dimensions of the GOP’s self-defeat on health care will emerge over time, but one immediate consequence is giving up block grants for Medicaid. This transformation would have put the program on a budget for the first time since it was created in 1965, and the bill’s opponents ought to be held accountable for the rising spending that they could have prevented.
The members of the House Freedom Caucus who killed ObamaCare’s repeal and replacement claim to be fiscal hawks. Most of them support a balanced budget amendment. Yet they gave zero credit to a reform that would have restored Medicaid—a safety net originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled—to its original, more limited purposes.
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Under extreme pressure from conservative activists, House Republican leaders and the White House have restarted negotiations on legislation to repeal the ACA. But efforts to revive the legislation in the House could take weeks, lawmakers conceded, as Congress moves forward with a full plate of other time-consuming issues. And the renewed push did not meet with much enthusiasm from Senate Republicans, who said they had other priorities at the moment. Nonetheless, Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to renew efforts to repeal the law, despite last’s week crushing setback when House Republicans tossed aside a repeal bill because they lacked the votes to pass it.
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