A few days ago, Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post wrote about a new phenomenon sweeping the nation: Republican candidates, all of whom have repeatedly either voted to repeal the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act or who have repeatedly called for it to be repealed, are suddenly falling all over themselves to try and claim that they support patient protections for those with pre-existing conditions...usually by invoking family members who suffer from various ailments.
Cohn's examples include GOP Congressman Mike Bishop (MI-08), who claims his wife has rheumatoid arthritis; Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48), who says his daughter survived childhood leukemia; John Faso (NY-19) and Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25), both of whose wives survived cancer; and Josh Hawley (MO-AG, running for MO-Sen), whose son has a rare chronic disease.
OK. Here we go. First, just as a refresher: Here's what the Individual Market was supposed to look like under the Affordable Care Act:
Here's what it actually looks like for a variety of reasons, including both legitimate glitches in the ACA itself as well as a whole lot of flat-out sabotage by the GOP over the past 7 years. While there are plenty of other issues which need to be addressed, the most obvious ones are that the tax credits need to be beefed up and applied to enrollees over the 400% FPL threshold, and the mandate penalty should really be increased. In short, two legs of the stool need to be lengthened...to continue the metaphor, we need a couple of shims. Around $12 billion per year or so should do the trick on the tax credit side. As it happens, one of the few useful parts of most of the GOP plans is that they do include a good $120 billion or so in "reinsurance/stabilization" funding over 10 years...which, in practice, would amount to about the same thing. The key is that this funding would have to be added to the existing ACA funding, not replacing it, which is what these plans do instead:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced Tuesday that he is canceling half of Congress’ annual month-long August recess, keeping lawmakers in town to finish their drawn-out and so far unsuccessful effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and tackle other pressing matters.
“Once the Senate completes its work on health care reform, we will turn to other important issues including the National Defense Authorization Act and the backlog of critical nominations,” he wrote.
Tensions are rising between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s leadership team and his party’s ideological factions, with a renewed sense of pessimism creeping into the Senate GOP’s efforts to repeal Obamacare.
