Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, Richard Burr and Rep. Fred Upton have
released the outlines of what might be a Republican plan to replace Obamacare, except that it doesn't really
replace Obamacare so much as send us back to pre-Obamacare days. What's more, this "plan," which hasn't even been drafted as actual legislation, has already been been offered and rejected by Republicans!
The plan, drafted with encouragement from Republican leaders in the Senate and the House, would retain some consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act, but would reduce federal regulation of insurance policies. States would have more authority to specify the "essential health benefits" that must be provided by insurance. As an example, the federal government would no longer require insurance policies to include coverage for maternity care. […]
Their plan includes a potentially explosive proposal: Workers would have to pay federal income tax on the value of employer-provided health benefits that exceed certain annual thresholds — $12,000 for individuals and $30,000 for families. Health benefits above those levels would be treated and taxed as regular income for the employee. The thresholds would increase over time.
Employers could still take tax deductions for the cost of employee health benefits as an incentive to continue providing coverage, Republicans said.
If this sounds familiar to you, it's because
they floated this same plan a year ago. Hatch, Burr and then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) came up with this "blueprint" that never became legislation largely because of the
tax hike it included, the same tax hike they include this time. This year they
throw in some favorite things of House Republicans: tort reform and selling insurance across state lines.
What's not included in their outline: "a formal estimate of the cost of their proposal or the number of people who would be covered." That would probably be because those numbers would prove that these ideas won't provide coverage to the millions who now have it under Obamacare, and won't match the cost savings the law has been delivering for the last few years, either to taxpayers or to individuals buying insurance.
Since 2010, Republicans have been promising a replacement plan. The 20 examples that TPM gathered are a broken record of "we're working on this" and "we'll offer better solutions." So far, this already floated and already rejected sketch of a plan from Hatch and team is the most comprehensive thing they've come up with, and it's dead on arrival.