The Truth About the GOP Health-Care Plan

Conservatives complain that much Obamacare coverage comes through the expansion of Medicaid rather than private exchanges, and they propose throwing the baby out with the bathwater by scrapping the Medicaid expansion by the end of 2019-which would strip millions of the only health-care plan they can afford.

This is how former USA president George W. Bush passed his massive tax-cut package in the first term of his presidency, and why it expired in 2013, setting up a massive fiscal showdown as Democrats attempted-and ultimately were able-to roll back some of the tax cuts on the wealthy.

“This is an all hands on deck because we all ran on repealing and replacing Obamacare”, he said. “Now is the time to act”. We did already know that in the resistance by so many red state legislatures and governors to Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, but now it’s the Republican Congress’s turn, and they are just vicious in their punishment of the Medicaid group. Of those, an estimated 1.3 million used their newly acquired insurance for substance abuse or mental health services, according to an analysis by researchers Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School and Sherry Glied of New York University.

While Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., stands behind the bill, which aims to repeal and replace Obamacare and its subsidies with a new system of tax credits, conservative lawmakers, such as Sens.

“We’re not stopping here”.

Because Ryan deviated from the 2015-2016 repeal bill that passed Byrd Rule muster, once it emerges from its bath, it will be a crippled bill, Lee said. But he reportedly also has been meeting with critics of the bill, and indicating that there may be room for negotiation to assuage some of their concerns. The proposal, first seen in February 10 draft of the bill, has been criticized as too meager to cover the full cost of a health insurance plan that provides full benefits.

“We promised we would repeal the Obamacare taxes”, Ryan responded.

It would also replace income-based subsidies to help with the cost of premiums with age-based tax credits.

“It still looks like Obamacare-lite to me”, said Senator Rand Paul. Walker had expressed opposition to an earlier draft of the bill but said Wednesday that it’s “trending in the right direction”, a positive sign for leadership.

Leading conservatives said they want the bill to erase coverage mandates Obama’s statute imposed, saying their top goal was to reduce consumers’ insurance costs including premiums.

To encourage people to buy coverage, the plan allows insurers to charge a 30 percent penalty to people who let their insurance lapse, and then try to buy a new policy. There are only 52 Republican senators, so the Republicans are instead using a budget process called reconciliation to pass the AHCA. And it’s certainly true that aspects of Obamacare are popular, or popular within important subgroups of voters, and that these political facts have affected the bill Republicans wrote. That means Republicans will have to get 60 votes in favor of such bills in the Senate, where they hold hold 52 seats.

SEAN SPICER, White House Press Secretary: This isn’t about trying to figure out how many special interests in Washington we can get paid off.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters earlier that advancing that date would be “very hard to do”. “Honestly, I think the real timetable … is a few months later when it sinks in that Obamacare has been repealed and Democrats might be willing to cut a deal of some sort”.