Today Senate Republicans unveiled their own attempt at healthcare "reform." It is meaner than the House bill, will likely leave even more Americans without insurance, and is targeted especially at phasing out the Medicaid program as we now know it. A roundup of what we know and what's happened so far:
URGENT: Give your Republican senator a piece of your mind about Trumpcare.
• The text of the bill—introduced as a "discussion draft" by Republicans—reveals an effort even more extreme than the House Republican version. It strips subsidies for insurance, replacing them with tax credits and reducing the number of families that can get them. As with the House bill, older Americans are especially hard-hit. It not only allows states to waive essential health benefits, allowing plans to be sold which refuse coverage for maternity care, cancer treatments, or other carve-outs, but does away with the requirement that those waivers be granted only if the state can provide equivalent coverage.
But the most dramatic measure is a phase-out of the Medicaid program. Not only is the expansion of Medicaid undone, but states would be free to eliminate coverage altogether; deep cuts to federal funding would all but require that they do so.
We won't know coverage estimates until the Congressional Budget Office is able to analyze and score the bill, but expectations are that the Senate bill will uninsure more Americans than even the House version.
• Sen. Bob Casey's office provided a public rundown of some of the biggest individual planks: The requirement that insurers cover certain essential health benefits is stripped. Price protections for those with preexisting conditions are stripped. "Decimating" Medicaid. A pittance towards the opioid epidemic—less than a twentieth of what Republican senators were previously demanding. And on, and on.
• A measure of how gargantuan the tax cuts for wealthy Americans are, and how much Medicaid coverage needed to be stripped in order to provide them: The "tax cuts that the 400 wealthiest families will get" from the Senate's healthcare repeal bill "roughly equal the federal cost of maintaining the expansion in Nevada, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alaska combined."
• Protests outside McConnell's offices were met with arrests, with officers forcibly removing some disabled protesters from their wheelchairs and handcuffing others while still seated in them. The protesters were unable to meet with McConnell because he is a coward.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2sH88JM
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