Rep. Brat reveals secret ‘sweet spot’ for GOP health bill passage

The Congressional Budget Office, the independent federal legislative financial analyst, isn’t flawless in its predictions.

The conservative lawmakers wouldn’t share the details of the plan, which will be presented to Republican leadership and members of the House Rules Committee next week. This will prove more hard, since analysis from the Congressional Budget Office and health policy experts have shown that support in the form of tax credits will decrease for recipients in Kentucky on average.

The three conservatives opposition marks a new level of open defiance to the Republican bill, which is opposed by every single Democrat and an increasing number of Republicans.

The CBO is widely respected but doesn’t have a flawless track record, including estimating that Obamacare would cover more people than it has.

The new Republican health care legislation in Congress could cost IL $40 billion dollars in federal funding over the next decade.

The more relevant fact for consumers is this: For a given customer, buying a plan that provides a given level of benefits, premiums are expected to be on average 13% higher under the AHCA than under Obamacare, using the CBO’s assumptions about premiums overall. “We have talked about repeal since 2010, I ran on it in 2010 and when people heard that, they heard ‘repeal Obamacare'”. (They are: Portman, Toomey, Paul, Flake, McCain, Cotton, Ernst, Capito, Gardner, Murkowski, Heller, Cassidy, Grassley, Hoeven, Daines, Boozman, Sullivan, Kennedy and McConnell.) It’s telling that some of these already have expressed concerns; now they all will have to decide whether to vote to phase out their state’s Medicaid expansions (among other damaging provisions) while deeply cutting taxes for the rich. That’s according to the recent report by the Congressional Budget Office.

“If we’re going to repeal Obamacare, we’re going to have to move to the floor”, he said.

“America suffers in the end, because we will still have elements of Obamacare that people don’t like”, Duncan said.

In the first year, the biggest reason more people are uninsured would be repeal of penalties Barack Obama’s law imposes on those deemed able to afford insurance but who don’t buy it.

When the host highlighted the asymmetry, suggesting “maybe this isn’t consistent with the message of the last election”, the president responded, “A lot of things aren’t consistent”.

Not in a good way, Democrats said. “They’re going to say not almost as many people are going to do that”.

“This is not a bill I could support in its current form”, Collins told the Portland Press Herald. “Let’s figure it out”, said Lafreyda Caldwell, California resident.

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., said on CNN that the Republican health bill was “still the largest welfare program ever proposed by the Republican Party”, adding, “Let’s be clear about something”.

Two House committees have approved the legislation and Ryan wants to bring it to the full House next week.

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the Freedom Caucus and one of the most outspoken critics of the bill, reiterated Tuesday that he and other conservatives have been working with the White House on changes to the Republican health plan. Only three Republicans need to vote “no” for the Ryan bill to fail.

GOP support became scarcer when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found this week that the legislation would push 24 million Americans off coverage in a decade and shift out-of-pocket costs toward lower income, older people.

Again in 2014, Pelosi did not consider CBO’s numbers “elegant”, or correct, when they forecast job losses from a Democratic effort to raise the minimum wage. That is in part because consumers would no longer be required to have insurance and in part because millions of Americans would lose financial assistance to get coverage. The CBO also notes that the GOP plan’s tax credits (available only to people who aren’t offered insurance at their jobs) would be available to more people than under Obamacare. Just 25 percent say it will lower deductibles, vs. 41 percent who say it will increase them.