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"The House bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare is officially dead.The bill, which was scheduled for a vote this afternoon, has been pulled from consideration. The move means that GOP's years-long quest to repeal and replace the health care law has failed. For the foreseeable future, at least, Obamacare will stay on the books.
President Trump stumped for the bill aggressively over the last several weeks, and White House Press Secretary said today that the president "left everything on the field when it comes to this bill." But in the end,Trump couldn't make it happen.
The bill was ill-conceived from the start. In part because of the need to follow a special process that would allow the bill to pass with a simple majority in the Senate, it left much of Obamacare's essential structure in place--including insurance regulations, subsidies paid through the tax system for individuals purchasing coverage on the individual market, and a mandatory penalty, assessed by insurers, for those who go without coverage and seek to regain coverage.
The bill would have transformed Medicaid into a per-capita block grant system, but not until the next decade, and in its initial form would have created incentives for states to expand the program. The bill would have resulted in individual insurance premiums rising 15 to 20 percent in the short term, and some 14 million people losing their insurance as of next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A final amendment to the bill, released late last night, might have sent the individual market into a complete and immediate meltdown.
The bill failed in part because it could not establish a balance between the concerns of moderate Republicans, particularly with regard to the way it treated the Medicaid expansion, and more conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus, who argued that the bill was too much like Obamacare, retaining its core scheme of subsidies and regulations.
But it also failed because Trump proved himself an ineffective negotiator and dealmaker—one whose preference for shallow political victories over substantive policy wins ultimately proved insufficient in a complex policy negotiation. "
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/24/the-gops-obamacare-repeal-bill-is-dead-b
President Trump stumped for the bill aggressively over the last several weeks, and White House Press Secretary said today that the president "left everything on the field when it comes to this bill." But in the end,Trump couldn't make it happen.
The bill was ill-conceived from the start. In part because of the need to follow a special process that would allow the bill to pass with a simple majority in the Senate, it left much of Obamacare's essential structure in place--including insurance regulations, subsidies paid through the tax system for individuals purchasing coverage on the individual market, and a mandatory penalty, assessed by insurers, for those who go without coverage and seek to regain coverage.
The bill would have transformed Medicaid into a per-capita block grant system, but not until the next decade, and in its initial form would have created incentives for states to expand the program. The bill would have resulted in individual insurance premiums rising 15 to 20 percent in the short term, and some 14 million people losing their insurance as of next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A final amendment to the bill, released late last night, might have sent the individual market into a complete and immediate meltdown.
The bill failed in part because it could not establish a balance between the concerns of moderate Republicans, particularly with regard to the way it treated the Medicaid expansion, and more conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus, who argued that the bill was too much like Obamacare, retaining its core scheme of subsidies and regulations.
But it also failed because Trump proved himself an ineffective negotiator and dealmaker—one whose preference for shallow political victories over substantive policy wins ultimately proved insufficient in a complex policy negotiation. "
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/24/the-gops-obamacare-repeal-bill-is-dead-b
