Mitch McConnell released what he and his leadership team are calling a "discussion draft" of Trumpcare on Thursday, calling it the "Better Care Reconciliation Act" (wags immediately added "Plan" to the end of the title so we can call it BRCAP). It's being carefully presented as just a discussion bill to give Republican senators the opportunity to publicly declare that that bill "as written" is unacceptable to them, from both the extreme right and the mainstream far right that passes for "moderate" these days.
This will allow McConnell to make some tweaks—like throwing a few billion more into opioid addiction treatment, or giving Medicaid expansion one more year to exist, or making the tax credits even more penurious to keep the undeserving from getting them—that will allow factions to declare victory on their particular issues and 50 of them to support the bill. Two Senators, one of which will likely be Nevada's Dean Heller will probably be allowed to vote no. Most of the in-fighting and posturing of the next week will be who gets to be the second one.
There's a helluva lot for the so-called moderates to oppose. Any hopes that the Senate would make the bill less harsh than what the House passed last month, the American Healthcare Act (AHCA) have been dashed. Here's some of the top line destruction it will create.
It will destroy Medicaid more completely than the House bill. While it waits until 2021 to phase out Medicaid expansion, it still ends it, and with it coverage for some 14 million Americans. It makes deeper future cuts to Medicaid than the House bill, setting a limit on per-person spending for states, and tying increases in that spending limit to the overall consumer price index, a measure that grows much more slowly than the increase in health spending, the measure the House bill used. In the long term, that means Medicaid will be cut far deeper in BCRAP. It ends Medicaid as we know it. It jeopardizes coverage for 1 in 5 Americans, for half of all births, for two-thirds of all seniors in nursing homes, for three-quarters of poor children.
It gives 400 of the country's highest-earning families a $33 billion tax break, blood money for those Medicaid cuts. Those cuts "roughly equal the federal cost of maintaining the expansion in Nevada, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alaska combined." Among those getting a big tax cut: health insurance CEOs. The Affordable Care Act taxed CEO income over $500,000, BCRAP ends that.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2tBy2Pc
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