GOP health care plan analysis due
Republicans criticize upcoming report
WASHINGTON — Republicans on Sunday dismissed an upcoming Congressional Budget Office analysis expected to conclude that more Americans will be uninsured under a proposal to dismantle Barack Obama’s health law, despite President Donald Trump’s promise of universal coverage.
Meanwhile, GOP opponents from the right and center hardened their positions against the Trump-backed legislation. House conservatives vowed to block the bill as “Obamacare Lite” unless there are more restrictions, even as a Republican senator warned the plan would never pass as is due to opposition from moderates.
“Do not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate and then have to face the consequences of that vote,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. “If they vote for this bill, they’re going to put the House majority at risk next year.”
Speaking in television interviews, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump administration officials vowed to move forward on their “repeal and replace” plan regardless of the CBO findings, insisting they can work past GOP disagreements and casting the issue as one of “choice” in which consumers are freed of a government mandate to buy insurance.
The CBO is scheduled to release its long-awaited cost analysis of the House GOP leadership plan early this week, including estimates on the number of people likely to be covered.
Ryan said he expects the CBO analysis to find fewer people will be covered under the GOP plan because it eliminates the requirement to be insured.
“What we’re trying to achieve here is bringing down the cost of care, bringing down the cost of insurance not through government mandates and monopolies but by having more choice and competition,” he said. “We’re not going to make an American do what they don’t want to do.”
The GOP legislation would eliminate the current mandate that nearly all people in the United States carry insurance or face fines. It would use tax credits to help consumers buy health coverage, expand health savings accounts, phase out an expansion of Medicaid and cap that program for the future, end some requirements for health plans under Obama’s law, and scrap a number of taxes.
During the presidential campaign and as recently as January, Trump repeatedly stressed his support for universal health coverage, saying his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act would provide “insurance for everybody.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said he “firmly” believed that “nobody will be worse off financially” under the health care overhaul. He said people will have choices as they select the kind of coverage they want as opposed to what the government forces them to buy.
In actuality, tax credits in Republican legislation being debated in the House may not be as generous to older people as what is in the current law.