GOP health care plan is an inferior copy of Obamacare

Perhaps, in the privacy of their own homes, the savvier ones are popping the champagne corks. Far from it. It’s already taking flak not just from Democrats who oppose repeal, but also fusillades of friendly fire from Republican conservatives who want a complete repeal of Obamacare.

Under the ACA, the value of the credits that any given consumer receives to purchase health insurance is dependent on both that consumer’s income and the cost of a silver-level health insurance plan in their state - low-income consumers in high-cost states receive larger credits than their counterparts in low-cost states. On May 15, 2015, Senate Republicans on the Budget Committee made the same promise whey they pledged that the Senate budget “provides for repeal of Obamacare to start over with patient-centered reforms”.

The Republican bill also ends the ACA’s individual mandate to have health insurance.

Democrats and their allies in the liberal policy community are not wrong to fret about that.

The leading Republican plan to replace Obamacare could end up with many more people being penalized – and for more money – for failing to have health insurance than are now fined under the current system. The ads featured women dancing and laughing as giant superimposed numbers demonstrated how much money the government was going to give them to offset their premium costs. The replacement legislation calls for eliminating the individual mandate and the employer mandate. As a result, several insurers have left the market, and there are lots of counties where only one insurance company is still selling in the exchanges. “He basically said whatever we need him to do … he’ll do that, because it’s really, as Mike Pence said, is a binary choice: You vote to keep Obamacare or you vote to repeal it”.

Liberals will hate the bill because, at its core, it pays for a tax break for the rich by taking Medicaid away from poor people, including Medicaid services for poor women provided by Planned Parenthood. What would it do to the federal deficit? But it also has some more controversial measures, such as curtailing federal support for Medicaid and providing refundable tax credits based mainly on age, not income.

Who knows if this bill would actually stabilize individual insurance markets, as the GOP claims?

The ratings and analytics firm S&P Global has ballparked the number of people who would lose their insurance at 6 million to 10 million; others have offered figures as high as 15 million and 20 million.

As work on the American Health Care Act intensifies, let’s revisit a few facts.

Still, the Democratic leader said she is skeptical that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and other Republican leaders would ask for Democratic help, even if their bill fails to pass because of a lack of support within the GOP. “That is bad politics, and more importantly, bad policy”, Needham continued.

Needham has a point.