I will be diving into The American Health Care Act, but wanted to provide everyone with some basic taking points.
Some immediate things that come to the surface:
1. Drops the individual mandate - which is currently spreading the costs of the sick and healthy in the risk pool
2. Drops the subsidies and replaces with tax credits based on age and income
3. Freezes Medicaid Expansion in 2020, based on income
4. Drops the Employer Mandate
5. Expands Health Savings Accounts
6. Defunds Planned Parenthood for 1 year
7. Keeps pre-existing protections
8. Keeps children to age 26
This bill has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who provides nonpartisan analysis for budget and economics. This is leaving some Republican law makers nervous about signing on to the bill, without seeing the costs associated with it.
What happens now? The Energy and Commerce Committee and the Ways and Means committee will review each part, perhaps make changes, if necessary.
They will then send it to The Budget Committee & the Rules Committee and once it leaves there, it goes to the House of Representatives.
It is also important to note, there are Republican senators who are voicing concerns, specifically about the Medicaid changes: Rob Portman (R-OH), Shelly Moore Capito (R- WV), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA). If you remember, Moore Capito and Cassidy were supporters of the Collins/Cassidy Bill.
More to come as we dive deeper into the details. Just a side note - the ACA/Omabacare regulations were 10,535 pages long; the final ACA statute, known at the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was 906 pages long. The American Health Care Act (AHCA??) is 123 pages long.
I read some the PDF of this bill, which Faso put a link to in his congressional newsletter. Much of it refers to parts of the ACA bill, by paragraph and section. So even though they say they're repealing and replacing, it looks like it's just replacing certain parts of the ACA and leaving most of it(?) There is a lot in the ACA that is not about the most well-known aspects. Lots about quality programs, etc. Maybe they're keeping those parts intact? But they're still bragging about how slim their plan is!
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