“After years of Obamacare’s broken promises, House Republicans today took an important step”, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden said in a statement.
The inclusion of the Planned Parenthood defunding language may help lure conservatives to support the legislation, but it could also make the draft bill’s passage through Congress more perilous.
Many conservatives have called for Replace bills at the same time as a repeal bill.
“We repeal all those taxes, those mandates, those subsidies“, Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, told host Bret Baier.
We don’t have the number estimates yet, but it’s clear that the GOP plan would lead to way fewer people being able to have their health covered.
The legislation would keep the Medicaid expansion program running until 2020. Under the new plan, states will be given “block grants” to fund Medicaid, set amounts of money that officials can use in different ways.
To incentivize those who don’t receive insurance through work to purchase coverage, a tax credit based on age would be provided for those looking to buy plans. The value of tax credits for poorer Americans will shrink under the bill.
The House GOP tax credit would range from $2,000 to $4,000 a year, increasing for older people.
The policy is a win for the health insurance industry and arguably a surprising move for Republicans after they frequently condemned the industry in the Obamacare debates. But under the GOP plan, Planned Parenthood would no longer be eligible to receive those reimbursements. It would change the way that Medicaid, the government program to provide insurance to poor people, functions. The draft bill additionally prohibits any plans offered on the individual market from covering abortions.
Medicaid will also see big changes.
Some of Obamacare’s most popular provisions would remain in place. It would also repeal the law’s taxes, some of which haven’t yet gone into effect. But the new bill is likely to draw fire from both the right and the left, and turning it into a law could become a slow, drawn-out process.
Rep. Greg Walden of OR is the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of two committees from which the bill originated.
Will all of this happen?
Brady’s “ObamaCare gone” comment was a reference to Sen.
After the release of the newly proposed bill, President Trump tweeted, “House just introduced the bill to #RepealAndReplace #Obamacare”. But that proposal isn’t yet anywhere close to becoming law.