A leaked “discussion draft” of House Republicans’ Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill surfaced on Friday. The draft reveals important details about the plan being designed by House GOP leadership. The 106-page discussion draft, dated February 10, was obtained by Politico. It corresponds reasonably closely to the 19-page outline that House GOP leadership leaked on February 16.
The centerpiece of the plan is its attempt to replace Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges with a new program that would provide subsidies for Americans to buy any health insurance plan that is legally available in their state. It would enact two key regulatory reforms of the individual market for health insurance: it would revert back to states the ability to define the “essential health benefits” that insurers must cover, and it would allow insurers to charge their policyholders a much wider range of prices based on age. The plan would also significantly expand the ability of Americans to save money, tax-free, in health savings accounts, and it would make two major changes to the Medicaid program:
- It phases down Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. States would retain the option to maintain a larger Medicaid program, but the federal government would only fund around 60% of the cost, compared to 90% under the ACA. That’s a fair way of balancing the interests of states that expanded Medicaid, and want to maintain that expansion, and states that did not, and don’t want to be punished for their fiscal restraint.
- It overhauls the pre-Obamacare Medicaid program, by converting it into a system of per-capita subsidies, in which states would receive a fixed dollar amount for each Medicaid enrollee resident within their borders, which they could then use to fund a safety-net health insurance program that they would design and administer.
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