Stop me if you've heard this before: the government could shut down in 8 days if Congress doesn't come up with a spending bill, and Republicans are figuring out what poison pills to put in the bill to screw over Democrats. And, of course, it's all about Obamacare. On the House side, they're trying to expand abortion restrictions and on the Senate side they're trying to chip away at the consumer protections that make the law popular.
The omnibus spending bill due by the end of next Friday is probably the last chance for the market stabilization efforts that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) would get a vote in return for her yes vote on the tax scam (yeah, Collins, we're never going to forget that). Before the whole tax scam fiasco and various continuing resolutions, there was a bipartisan agreement on those stabilization bills, stemming from the efforts of Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN). That's out the window now, apparently. Here's where they're fighting now.
Dueling proposals recently introduced in the Senate take aim specifically at the question of cheap, deregulated, short-term health insurance plans, which are expected to lure younger and healthier people out of the ACA market and drive up premiums for those who remain.
A Democratic bill would sharply limit those short-term plans and force them to adopt Obamacare's protections for people with pre-existing conditions. But a Republican effort, supported by the White House, wants to go in the opposite direction. It seeks to extend the length of short-term plans and make them renewable, essentially making the short-term plans indistinguishable from regular insurance plans and creating a entire shadow health care market free from the ACA's rules and regulations.
"It's a trapdoor out of Obamacare," Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the author of the pro-short-term provision, explained to TPM. "It lets people buy what works for them and their families—what they want, not what the government wants them to have."
Sure, those plans could be cheaper for some. They could also be refused to people with pre-existing conditions and could charge far more for gender, or age, or health status. They could—if they can be renewable and longer-term—impose annual and lifetime caps that Obamacare did away with. And they could be extremely destructive, pulling healthy people out of the markets. If Barrasso's effort is included in the omnibus, Democrats of course say it jeopardizes passage of the bill.
"I cannot support junk plans. I cannot support the erosion of patient protections with regard to pre-existing conditions," said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the top Democrat on the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee, which handles health policy. "We want to strengthen the ACA, and what the Republicans are proposing weakens it. It weakens people’s access to health care."
Before Republicans decide to play this game of Obamacare sabotage chicken with Democrats, however, they might want to take another look at that special election in Pennsylvania this week. The one where the Democrat won in a district that had gone to Trump by 20 points. The one where voters said in exit polls that they "disapproved of the Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act by 14 points (53% to 39%)."