Congressional Republicans seem to be gearing up to shoot themselves in the foot on health care, again (how nice for them that they don’t have to worry about their coverage). Despite last month’s Trumpcare disaster and the growing popularity of Obamacare, Republicans have kept working on zombie Trumpcare, and now they seem to think they have the next plan they’re going to fail with, thanks to a deal between House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows and Tuesday Group co-chair Tom MacArthur.
The new plan would pretend to keep popular Obamacare provisions like Essential Health Benefits and the prohibition on charging people with pre-existing conditions so much that they’re effectively denied insurance—but there’s a giant loophole. States could get waivers on those provisions if they fulfilled certain completely inadequate conditions, like putting people with pre-existing conditions into high risk pools.
“This effectively allows states to eliminate the ACA’s guarantee of access to insurance at a reasonable price for people with pre-existing conditions, in the interest of lowering premiums for people who are healthy,” Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, said upon seeing a description of the proposal. “It seems to tilt heavily towards what the Freedom Caucus has been looking for.”
Republicans argue that the high-risk pools would then cover those people, taking them out of the regular insurance pool and lowering prices for everyone else, but high-risk pools have traditionally been underfunded by states and the federal government, resulting in poor coverage and high costs for those who need insurance the most.
So basically they’re hoping to con people out of noticing that Essential Health Benefits and pre-existing protections will be gone (at least in many states) until it’s too late.
The MacArthur Amendment does nothing about Trumpcare’s giant cuts to Medicaid, which many Republican so-called moderates have said were unacceptable. As former Harry Reid staffer Adam Jentleson tweeted, “MacArthur has put moderates in position to take the blame if the new bill fails and lose their seats if it passes.”