Reid Web site
Ezra has a follow-up on a story posted here yesterday. The House bill would replace revenue lost by repealing the unpopular 1099 tax provisions in the Affordable Care Act by dramatically increasing the costs to some middle-class consumers who will receive subsidies for insurance under the law. Consumers who make under 400 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for subsidies. If those people on the cusp of that 400 percent line have even a modest change in income that would put them over, they would have to pay back their entire subsidy in the House GOP's plan. That could amount to thousands of dollars.
Ezra writes that Hill staffers are contacting him with their concerns that the Senate is going to rubberstamp this bad repeal legislation.
When the Senate repealed the provision, they paid for it by canceling other spending that Congress had authorized, but that hadn’t yet been put to a particular purpose. House Republicans took a different approach. They’re trying to sharply increase the amount of subsidies that families will have to pay back if their income increases during the course of a year. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a longer explanation of how this would work, but here’s the short version:
Under their proposed policy, a family with income at 225 percent of the poverty line who needed subsidies for the first half of the year but canceled them mid-year when the husband got a better job could get a bill for more than $4,500 at the end of the year.
A more worrying example goes the other way: Imagine a family where the breadwinner makes much more than 400 percent of poverty, but loses his job late in the year. He tries to apply for subsidies so the family can keep getting health insurance but is told that he shouldn’t bother — because his total income that year will still be above 400 percent of poverty, he’ll get a bill at the end of the year forcing him to pay back the money.
The Affordable Care Act, unfortunately, already includes a “payback” policy along these lines — the House Republicans are just proposing to make it much, much worse. This will do two things: make people hate the Affordable Care Act for bait-and-switching them, and keep people from entering the exchanges because they’ve heard horror stories of huge bills....
Undermining the already shaky popular support for the law by passing the House provision is just a bad, unnecessary idea. Creating this huge burden on middle-class families, when the whole idea of the law was to provide them affordable care, is an even worse idea.