The House on Thursday passed a new version of a health care bill to replace the Affordable Care Act after the first one failed to get enough Republican support in March. The first step toward delivering on a years-long campaign promise despite mounting concerns from healthcare groups that the legislation would strip protections enjoyed by millions of Americans. The bill still needs to pass the Senate before becoming law.
After years of debate, the House voted Thursday to repeal key parts of the Affordable Care Act and replace them with new provisions. Following the House vote, House Republicans celebrated with a press conference at the White House Rose Garden with President Donald Trump with Several Senate leaders, including health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Vice President Mike Pence, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Trump touted the bill as a "great plan" even though they got "no support from the other party." The bill passed the House in a narrow 217-213 vote. All Democrats opposed the bill. Democrats chanted "nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye" and waved at vulnerable Republicans as the vote passed.
The bill would make deep and sweeping changes to the American health care system. Most controversially, the American Health Care Act would allow insurance companies to charge people with pre-existing conditions higher premiums than healthy people in some states that choose to do so. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., told MSNBC shortly before the vote began, "We were elected to do this." But passing the legislation is a major relief for House Republican leaders, who had struggled for months to get enough of their members on the same page.
An earlier analysis of the bill from the CBO before several amendments were added projected that 24 million additional Americans would be uninsured by 2026 and that it would reduce the deficit by $337 billion, compared to the Affordable Cart Act. The bill also restructures Medicaid payments to the states, reducing federal spending. Another amendment was added to win back centrists worried about the effect of those state waivers. That change poured an additional $8 billion into high-risk insurance pools to cover patients with preexisting conditions who can’t obtain traditional coverage.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the changes meant to win over conservatives could also let large employers pick which state they want to buy healthcare from. That could let them skirt rules banning lifetime caps on paying out healthcare coverage for their employees and could return America to the pre-Obamacare days where serious expensive illnesses could force people into bankruptcy. Healthcare-related bankruptcies have fallen by more than half in the years since the law was put in place.
“Death spiral!” the president Donald Trump wrote on Twitter.
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