While House Speaker Paul Ryan's goal with Trumcpare was just to get some damned thing passed, there seem to be some Senate Republicans who actually want the thing to sort of work, and maybe not make all of their constituents enraged at them. As to the "making it work" part, they're figuring out that, yeah, Obamacare got a lot of it right, after all. That's particularly true when it comes to the linchpin of it all—subsidies to make health insurance affordable.
Senate Republicans are working on a potential breakthrough that could help push through an Obamacare repeal bill – by making insurance subsidies look a lot like Obamacare.
There’s growing support for the idea of pegging the tax credits in the House repeal bill to income and making aid more generous for poorer people. But those moves — while they may win consensus among Senate moderates — are unlikely to sit well with House conservatives.
The financial assistance in the House bill “is just not robust enough to make sure that low-income individuals can actually afford a [health] plan,” said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.). “If you bring those income limits down for people who really need the help, you can give them more help.”
Though the senators are intensely divided on other issues in the repeal package, the tax subsidies are emerging as one of the few areas of agreement within the Senate GOP as they start to write their own Obamacare repeal bill. The goal is to provide more assistance to very low-income Americans than the House did, according to several Republican lawmakers and congressional aides.
That's not going to go over well with the maniacs who are in control on the House side. They really don't want low-income folks getting any assistance—witness what they do to Medicaid. Speaking of which, the Senate death panel seems okay with, so they're concern has its limits.
The more the Senate version of Trumpcare looks like Obamacare, the harder it's going to be for the House to accept the changes. So you go, Senate Republicans. You do you. And while you're at it, think about the president you're doing it for.