Nate Cohn/Upshot:
The people who stand to lose the most in tax credits under the House Republican health plan tended to support Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to a new Upshot analysis.
Over all, voters who would be eligible for a tax credit that would be at least $1,000 smaller than the subsidy they’re eligible for under Obamacare supported Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton by a seven-point margin.
The voters hit the hardest — eligible for at least $5,000 less in tax credits under the Republican plan — supported Mr. Trump by a margin of 59 percent to 36 percent.
Catherine Rampell/WaPo:
Let’s abandon the pretense.
Republicans’ “health care” bill is not really about health care. It’s not about improving access to health insurance, or reducing premiums, or making sure you get to keep your doctor if you like your doctor. And it’s certainly not about preventing people from dying in the streets.
Instead, it’s about hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts — tax cuts that will quietly pave the way for more, and far larger, tax cuts.
Avik Roy/WaPo with conservative view of ACHA:
[Rand] Paul, apparently, is fine with Obamacare Lite proposals if they benefit older people who vote for him.
Rhetorically, GOP hard-liners such as [Rand] Paul claim that they are implacably opposed to federal subsidies for health insurance, that they’re taking a brave stand against big government. Operationally, however, they support subsidies for the rich, and only oppose subsidies for the poor and the sick. That comes across not as a principled stand against statism, but as a political stand against Americans whose votes they don’t need.
Real conservative reformers, who have been studying this problem for years, understand that the way to make our health-care system freer and fairer is to rectify that imbalance between how we subsidize health insurance for the wealthy and how we do it for the poor. That would involve reorienting Medicare away from the wealthy and toward the middle class and the poor. It would involve reforming the tax subsidy for, yes, Cadillac health insurance plans. It would involve helping vulnerable and poor Americans buy private coverage and build health savings accounts.
Paul is right that the American Health Care Act is flawed. But it isn’t flawed because it offers financial assistance to the uninsured. It’s flawed because it doesn’t provide enough assistance to them, making premiums unaffordable for many poor people. Republicans can fix that problem while also reducing the size of government, but only if they’re willing to limit the role of government in subsidizing health insurance for the wealthy.
When Paul introduces a bill ending government subsidies for wealthy Americans’ health care, it’ll be easier to take seriously his crusade against subsidies for the poor. Until then, few will.
PBS:
Medicaid cuts are ‘going to affect everyone,’ insurance CEO says
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The GOP, for years, not just with regards to Obamacare, has said that Medicaid is too big, costs the government too much, costs the states too much, and that they have to control these costs.
What is your response to that?
MARIO MOLINA: Well, you know, the CBO has looked at this. And they have found that the most cost-effective way of covering low-income people is actually through Medicaid.
Medicaid accounts for 50 percent of all births in this country. One-third of all the children are covered under Medicaid, and it pays for half of long-term care. So it’s a big program that covers 72 million people….
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I know you have been on the Hill and talking to a lot of members of Congress. What do you tell them when they’re in the midst of this debate right now? What have you been saying to them?
MARIO MOLINA: Well, you know, we have been trying to educate them about what this is going to mean for the average American and then the ripple effects through the economy.
So, for example, there was a study done by the University of Michigan that showed this was going to put about $400 million into the Michigan economy. That’s going to go away. And it’s going to have a ripple effect.
Many smaller rural hospitals are likely to go out of business. And so, even if you have private insurance, you have difficulty getting access to care, because your community hospitals may be gone. The E.R. is going to be crowded with people who were insured and now have no place to go.
So it’s going to affect everyone, regardless of what type of insurance you have.
Benjy Sarlin/NBC:
Republicans are going to war with each other over the House health care bill's cuts to Medicaid, setting up an ideological split that could imperil efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Obamacare expanded Medicaid funding and required that states use the money to cover Americans with higher-incomes, a move that the later Supreme Court made optional. The House's proposed replacement, the American Health Care Act, would phase out the expansion funding, threatening coverage for roughly 11 million people it's added to the rolls.
The House plan would also dramatically reform the underlying Medicaid program to pay states a fixed per-capita amount to cover their population based on their average expenses — a move that's likely to reduce funding over time. Conservative policy experts argue states will find ways to administer the program more efficiently under the change.
The GOP bill's Medicaid provisions are reigniting a longstanding debate between conservatives who have long been critical of the program's cost and performance against more moderate Republicans worried that cuts will blow a hole in their state's budget and leave patients out in the cold.
Michael Crowley/Politico:
The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West
Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his crosshairs. Here’s how the White House could genuinely help pull it apart.
“Bannon hates the EU,” says Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart writer who split with Bannon last year but who shares the sentiment. “He figures it’s mainly an instrument for globalism—as opposed to an instrument for the bettering of Western civilization.”
“What we understand from Bannon is that the EU is abhorrent,” one Western European government official told me.
The idea that one man could threaten the European project might sound extreme. And it would be an exaggeration to say that even the full-throated support of Breitbart London was what tipped the scales toward Brexit. But having the ear of the president of the United States is different—and the question of just what Bannon plans to do with his influence has become a huge preoccupation of diplomats, European government officials and experts on the venerable trans-Atlantic relationship. In more than a dozen interviews, they recounted a creeping sense of dread about the very specific ways that Bannon could use American power like a crowbar to pull the EU apart.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Republicans are trying to destroy the very idea of neutral judgment
We need to talk about the Congressional Budget Office. But before you click away from what you assume will be a dreadfully boring discussion of arcane legislative procedures, let me assure you that there’s something larger going on in this argument, one that gets to the heart of where the Trump administration and Republicans are taking our entire political system. So stick with me.
In their weirdly accelerated effort to pass a repeal and replacement for the Affordable Care Act, Republicans bypassed normal procedures by not waiting for the CBO to “score” their bill before passing it through its first committee vote, which happened after 4 a.m. Thursday. There isn’t any mystery about why they’re in such a rush: They’re scared that the CBO score will say that their bill will lead to massive numbers of Americans losing their health coverage, increases in premiums and out-of-pocket costs, an earlier date at which the Medicare trust fund will be depleted and who knows what else. Once the score is issued, it will probably become a weapon Democrats can use against the bill.
Michael D’Antonio/CNN:
On Wednesday, former Governor Jon Huntsman accepted President Donald Trump's offer to serve as US ambassador to Russia. Having previously served as an ambassador to China, Huntsman may feel prepared for the task at hand. But chances are he will become the latest Trump employee to face professional embarrassment in the days and weeks to come.
Just look at Sean Spicer squirm and wiggle away from questions about President Trump's outrageous claims, something the White House spokesman has been required to do many times since Inauguration Day. Once a highly-regarded professional, Spicer has become Exhibit A in a growing body of evidence that suggests that serious people with reputations they value serve the President at their own peril.
Philip Klein/WashExaminer:
The current healthcare plan proposed by Republicans, in preserving a lot of spending and regulations, was designed to blunt Democratic attacks that they are stripping health insurance away from millions of people. But by providing less generous subsidies than Obamacare, the GOP is already subjecting itself to such an attack. Because it repeals Obamacare's taxes but retains a significant amount of spending, it isn't clear it would reduce the deficit. If it doesn't, Democrats could be able to use a score from the Congressional Budget Office to make the following politically potent attack: the Republican plan throws millions of people off of health coverage while increasing deficits.
HuffPost:
Insurance Companies Just Accidentally Made The Case For Medicare For All
It’s all about the overhead and profit.
Democracy Corps with a fascinating look at Macomb County trump voters:
In this maelstrom, these Trump voters will only re-affirm their vote in the short-term. But in time, I believe a significant number of them will fail to turnout or support Republicans in mid term elections, many will rally to populist Democratic candidates, and some will pull back fromTrump. Why do I say most of these voters can move in time?
- Many are put out of reach by their racist sentiment, Islamophobia, and disdain for multiculturalism,as so many op-ed writers have written poignantly, but a great many are not.Most support legal immigration, many are open to a multicultural America, and the great majority has moved on from Detroit’s troubled white-and-black history
- They do not trust the congressional Republicans, particularly on the economy or representing working people.
- One-third assigned only a moderate level of emotional significance to their vote forTrump and for most of them “anything was better than Hillary Clinton.” They described her as “a criminal,” “a liar,” and “a typical crooked politician.” One said she voted against corruption and against pay-for-play, and Hillary’s big mega-millions background.”And another, “I wasn’t super excited, and I had to weigh the pros and the cons, and then Hillary just kept getting herself deeper and deeper and deeper.”
- Even though they are defending Trump now, many were shaken by some of the doubts we tested. Some became exasperated, when we got to the right “drain the swamp” critique– a critique of his cabinet of “million-dollar campaign donors, [bailed out] bankers from Goldman Sachs and people who used undocumented workers in their homes.” Also concerning to them was the prospect of his promised middle class tax going mostly to the top 1 percent, including a $4 billion break for the Trump family. These doubts makeTrump appear a typical politician and say it’s back to the same “bullshit.”
- A majority of these voters were very open to Democrats like Senators Brown, Sanders and Warren who oppose trade deals, want to protect consumers from Wall Street, oppose corporate tax breaks, and will bar secret campaign money so government works for the middle class. That’s the kind of change they were hungry for.
But progressives will only get an audience with these voters if they listen to them and understand why they were desperate for sweeping changes, why they voted for Trump and what message they were sending to the elites about putting ‘us’ and America first. They support Trump for understandable reasons, including concerns about controlling immigration and health care costs, and frustrations with President Obama’s light and elite footprint on the economy. Acknowledging those concerns and the effects of Democratic governance on their lives is the first step to making headway with these voters.