On Monday, Republican leaders released their long-awaited Obamacare replacement bill, but unfortunately for conservatives, the legislation fails to live up to the hype.
For years, Republicans have been vocally opposed to Obamacare, and repeatedly pledged to repeal and replace the disastrous healthcare law with a patient-centered, free market alternative.
They said in 2010 that they needed to win the House to repeal Obamacare, and failed to deliver. Then, they said they couldn’t repeal Obamacare until they won the House and Senate – and failed to deliver. Now, voters have given them the House, Senate, and the White House. So what are they going to do with it?
The GOP legislation, known as the American Health Care Act, does very little to address these issues, and many conservatives have labeled it Obamacare 2.0.
From Fox News:
The bill would continue Obama’s expansion of Medicaid to additional low-earning Americans until 2020. After that, states adding Medicaid recipients would no longer receive the additional federal funds the statute has provided. More significantly, Republicans would overhaul the federal-state Medicaid program, changing its open-ended federal financing to a limit based on enrollment and costs in each state.
In addition, the legislation “also seeks to return responsibility to people to use tax credits or their own savings to pay for health insurance, instead of getting subsidies, which conservatives approve of” but the use of tax credits is still seen by many as having too much government involvement in healthcare.
Almost immediately after the legislation was announced by GOP leaders, members of the House Freedom Caucus denounced the bill as simply a new “entitlement program” through the use of tax credits. Congressman Jim Jordan told Politico “This is Obamacare by a different form. They’re still keeping the taxes in place and Medicaid expansion, and they’re starting a new entitlement.”
Still have not seen an official version of the House Obamacare replacement bill, but from media reports this sure looks like Obamacare Lite!
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 6, 2017
Congressman Dave Brat, an economist who famously defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 Republican Primary, also told Politico he’d vote against the current bill because “the bill maintains many of the federal features including a new entitlement program as well as most of the insurance regulations. Now [they] are saying we’re going to do repeal and replace but the bill does nothing of the sort. [Speaker] Ryan has always said the entire rationale for this bill is to bend the cost curve down, and so far I have seen no evidence that this bill will bring the cost curve down.”
Health policy analyst Dean Clancy calls the new healthcare legislation “a back-door individual mandate” and outlines two features of the proposal that go against many of the Republican promises over the last seven years:
** A new “continuous coverage” penalty that jacks up your health insurance premiums by 30 percent if your coverage has lapsed for any reason for more than 60 days during the past 12 months.
** A new “refundable” health insurance tax credit (essentially a voucher) worth thousands of dollars a year, that you must buy government-approved health insurance to obtain, and which, if you decline it, means you forgo those thousands of dollars—in other words, a nominal carrot with the effect of a stick.
Clancy explains that tax credits are certainly better than the disastrous individual mandate, “But when you combine it with the mandate, the whole package becomes essentially coercive—basically, an individual mandate by another name. The sad thing is, it’s unnecessary.”
The government shouldn’t be involved in our healthcare choices, and while the GOP alternative has a few features that are nominally better than Obamacare, it fails in its objective to repeal Obamacare and its provisions.
Are you going to support the GOP’s Obamacare alternative or do you think it should be replaced with a truly conservative healthcare alternative? Share your thoughts below!