Health care debate shifting over to Senate

Numerous issues from the original legislation persist; the bill would still cap Medicaid, disproportionately affecting rural Americans who enroll in Medicaid at higher rates, and whose hospitals rely more on the program than their urban counterparts.

The campaign will run in congressional districts in 15 states.

Female senators will apparently be included in the Republicans’ all-male working group on health care after all.

“You cut out the funding”, Pallone said.

A senior White House official also told The Wall Street Journal that the prospect of more insurers announcing they will pull out of ACA marketplaces next year might help Republicans push their bill through the Senate. Such a scenario would force the House and Senate to work together to forge a compromise bill.

The long-running USA health care debate now moves to the Senate, where the fate of the repeal effort is uncertain.

Obama defended his signature achievement in Boston Sunday night while accepting the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said on ABC’s “This Week”. The just-passed American Health Care Act’s 5-1 ratio is a lot closer to the cost differences in covering America’s youngest and oldest adults.

“This is an act of deliberate betrayal: Everything about Trumpcare is specifically created to do exactly the opposite of what Trump, Paul Ryan and other Republicans said it would”, Krugman observes. The bill states, word-for-word: “Nothing in this act shall be construed as permitting health insurance issuers to limit access to health coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions”. A powerful, conservative group plans to give them some cover and defend House Speaker Paul Ryan. This allowed House Speaker Paul Ryan and others to frame it as a humane, less expensive reform measure that represents a huge improvement on Obamacare.

But he’s defending the House version anyway. What the Republicans are planning to do right now is upsetting to me and many people- because it basically would take away health care for people with pre-existing conditions.

Trump celebrated its passage with House Republicans in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, an unusual move following passage of a bill by one House of Congress.

Tensions are clearly running high.

Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is not seeking re-election next year, warned the bill “has the potential to severely harm the health and lives of people in south Florida”.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand called on Senate Republicans to reject the U.S. House plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, calling the measure a “cruel and unsafe bill”, that would leave millions of Americans “stranded without the health care they need”.

Even so, Manchin said Senate Republicans haven’t yet asked Democrats to work on a bill.

Collins is a moderate senator whose vote will be important in the narrowly divided Senate. Coverage would be disrupted for millions nearly immediately, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of a previous iteration of the legislation. She says senators will “come up with a whole new fresh approach”.

[P] rior to Obamacare, the vast majority of Americans with health insurance were already in plans that were required to offer them coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Price said the changes will make sure that people who rely on Medicaid get the care and coverage that they need.

Democrats are united in opposition to the House bill to gut former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. The premise of both these approaches is the same: to encourage people to get and keep health coverage, so that it is truly insurance against the risk of illness.