Why the Emerging Bill to Repeal the Affordable Care Act Will Fail
Rather long piece that covers the proposed Republican replacement. FWIW I hope this article is correct in predicting the bill will not pass.
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Last week, the House majority released an outline for repealing the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Although the document provides no new details, it does provide enough information to evaluate the adequacy of financing, the likely policies needed to pay for new tax credits for health insurance, the likely effects on tax credit levels, and the political hurdles to such an approach. This analysis is based exclusively on numbers from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO.
Although the congressional majority will claim that the emerging repeal bill represents a simultaneous replacement of the ACA, the math does not add up. Using CBO estimates, the Center for American Progress calculates that the repeal bill will cut the Medicaid expansion by $277 billion over 10 years. To finance new tax credits for health insurance, the repeal bill will likely cut Medicaid—including funding for nursing homes for the middle class—by an additional $370 billion over 10 years.
Even with these massive cuts, the repeal bill will still fall $171 billion short of the funding needed to fully replace the ACA’s exchange subsidies—a shortfall of 26 percent. The average subsidy per recipient could fall from $6,314 under the ACA to $2,703 under the repeal bill—a drop of 57 percent.
To reduce this disparity in subsidy levels, the repeal bill will likely need to increase taxes on tens of millions of workers in the middle class. It would do so while immediately cutting taxes for the wealthy by more than $346 billion over 10 years—giving millionaires an average tax cut of more than $50,000 in 2017 alone. But even with this harsh financing, because the repeal bill will extend tax credits to higher-income individuals, subsidy levels would still be 42 percent lower than under the ACA.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2017/02/23/426770/why-the-emerging-bill-to-repeal-the-affordable-care-act-will-fail/
