House leadership gave one more reward to the maniacs in the Freedom Caucus overnight to try to secure their support for Trumpcare by ditching the essential health benefits in Obamacare—all the things that make health insurance actually health insurance worth purchasing. To placate "moderates" (people who might be okay with taking insurance away from 24 million people but see that it's bad to end drug treatment in the middle of an opioid epidemic and to take maternity and newborn care away) they added in a one-time $15 billion to the bill's $100 billion "stability fund." That's what Republicans would have called a "slush fund for insurance companies."
Any moderate Republican who thinks this is going to make a bit of difference in the havoc this bill would wreak is an idiot or an ideologue.
No one should fall for it — a one-time $15 billion investment with little direction on how to spend the funds wouldn’t come close to offsetting the enormous damage that the underlying House bill would do to millions of people who would lose these important categories of care.
That's because the underlying House bill would increase the number of people without health insurance by 24 million by 2026, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, and it would have particularly harmful effects on access to treatment for mental illness and substance use disorders (SUDs). Specifically, it effectively ends the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansion, which has dramatically improved access to treatment; convert Medicaid to a per capita cap; and roll back requirements that health plans in the individual and small-group markets cover a list of "essential health benefits" that include behavioral health care, which encompasses treatment for mental illness and SUDs.
By the year 2020, experts estimate that spending under Obamacare for behavioral health will reach $7 billion per year. So the one-time $15 billion infusion Republicans are making wouldn't last much further than the next election, and certainly won't cover all the people that are in danger of overdosing in their own districts. Not when you add in all the women who are going to be needing health care for their pregnancies and their newborns.
And if you pile Planned Parenthood defunding on top of that? A lot more women having unplanned pregnancies—several thousand, according to the CBO. The cost to Medicaid in 2017 alone—this year? About $21 million. That's $6 million more than the buy-off leadership is offering to the moderates. The $15 billion isn’t going to go very far when these costs start adding up. If moderates accept that buy-off, if they tout it as the thing that makes this bill less horrible, they have even less principle than the Freedom Caucus maniacs.
The vote is happening TODAY. Even if you already called your member of Congress, do it again by calling the Capitol Hill switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Jam the phone lines, urge them to vote NO.