Price is of the view that we are going to end up subsidizing the health care of the poor and the indigent one way or the other. We can do it through cost shifting and subsidies conferred on impersonal hospital bureaucracies or we can give the money to the people and let the bureaucracies compete for their patronage. The Price tax credit would be refundable and it would vary by age. But unlike the Obamacare credits, Price’s credit would be the same, regardless of income.
That last feature is huge. The most important reason why the exchanges have been so dysfunctional is the need to verify income.
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Congress may vote to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law before coming up with a replacement, GOP leaders said Tuesday.
The approach could allow congressional Republicans to take swift action on one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises, while putting off the hard part. And while repealing the law could be done with GOP votes alone, any replacement plan would likely require the cooperation of minority Democrats in the Senate, something that will not be easy to come by.
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House Republicans are taking pole position in repealing and replacing ObamaCare with Donald Trump’s pick of Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services.
The Republican lawmaker from Georgia, a confidant of Speaker Paul Ryan(R-Wis.) and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, is a former physician with a deep understanding of both the thorny politics and wonky details of healthcare.
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The most likely scenario to achieve reform and assure coverage similar to what currently exists is to pass a reconciliation bill similar or identical to the bill passed approximately a year ago. This bill eliminated funding for the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies in the exchange and also includes a two-year implementation delay. Since the majority of newly insured individuals have come from Medicaid rather than the exchanges, this portion of the repeal, unless accompanied by other changes such as a refundable tax credit, would have the largest effect on the newly insured.
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Any Republican attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act must address Medicaid, which has literally become the 800-pound gorilla in the health-care policy room. Simply rolling back the ACA’s Medicaid expansion would spike the number of uninsured Americans and expose Congress and the Trump administration to withering criticism. On the other hand, leaving Medicaid unchanged exposes the federal budget to the program’s unsustainable cost trajectory: Federal Medicaid spending has doubled over the past decade.
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On Tuesday, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that he will nominate Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.) for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It’s a strong pick, and one that increases the likelihood that Republicans will succeed in repealing and replacing Obamacare. Here’s why.
Price, who chairs the House Budget Committee and represents the northern suburbs of Atlanta, has long been one of the House of Representative’s foremost policy wonks. He previously chaired the Republican Study Committee and the Republican Policy Committee, two of the most significant Congressional engines of conservative policy thinking.
And he has long been passionate about, and constructive on, health care reform.
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If Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have a mandate to do anything, it is to repeal Obamacare. The law is already cratering. Sick enrollees, former president Bill Clinton laments, are seeing “their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.” Even supportive economists admit the program is in a death spiral.
Repeal won’t be easy. But if Trump sets for Congress the same agenda he laid out during the campaign, he could become America’s greatest health-care reformer, all while cutting taxes more than Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush combined.
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President-elect Donald Trump has selected Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a leading critic of the Affordable Care Act, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed by the Senate, he would play a central role repealing and replacing the ACA. Price, an orthopedic surgeon, has for years been refining his own detailed plan for health reform, the Empowering Patients First Act. It would repeal the law, but, among many other changes, would provide support for those not eligible for employer-based coverage or public programs through age-adjusted refundable tax credits. (Price also played a key role this year in developing the House Better Way proposal unveiled by Speaker Paul Ryan in June that takes the legislative process a step further.)
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The health care crowd in the Beltway is abuzz this morning with press reports that president-elect Donald Trump has named Georgia Congressman Tom Price, M.D. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a related move, he will name longtime Mike Pence aide Seema Verma to the critical role of administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services. As a result, there’s a raft of interest in how Obamacare “repeal and replace” will now proceed.
It’s important to not get ahead of ourselves here and reflect on what a huge pro-taxpayer accomplishment Obamacare repeal will be. By all accounts, Obamacare will be off the books early in 2017, perhaps before the Patriots win their fifth Super Bowl in NRG Stadium in Houston on the first Sunday in February. Understandably, most of the attention has been focused on the health care aspects of this. But this action will be an enormous tax cut for the American people, with implications for tax reform later in the year.
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President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will nominate Georgia Rep. Tom Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Cabinet-level pick, which requires Senate confirmation, inserts one of Obamacare’s most outspoken critics into the key position to dismantle it and help Republicans implement their own blueprint for health care reform.
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