GOP’s new health care bill is, incredibly, even worse

A few days ago the tweeter in chief demanded that Congress enact “a beautiful new HealthCare bill” before it goes into recess. But now we’ve seen Senate Majority Leader’s Mitch McConnell’s latest version of health “reform,” and “beautiful” is hardly the word for it.

In fact, it’s surpassingly ugly, intellectually and morally. Previous iterations of Trumpcare were terrible, but this one is, incredibly, even worse.

Let’s talk about the one piece of the new bill that may sound like a step in the right direction, and why it’s largely a scam. The original Senate bill got a lot of justified bad press for slashing Medicaid while offering big tax cuts for the rich. So this version rolls back some though by no means all of those tax cuts, which sounds like a concession to moderates.

At the same time, the bill would allow people to use tax-favored health savings accounts to pay insurance premiums. This effectively creates a big new tax shelter that mostly helps people with high incomes who (a) can afford to put a lot of money into such accounts and (b) face high marginal tax rates, and hence get big tax savings. So this is still a bill that takes from the poor to give to the rich; it just does so with extra stealth.

Still, this tax shuffle gives McConnell a bit more money to play with. So how does he address the two big problems with the original bill — savage cuts to Medicaid and soaring premiums for older, less affluent workers? He doesn’t.

Those brutal Medicaid cuts are still part of the plan — and yes, they are cuts, despite desperate Republican attempts to pretend that they aren’t. The subsidy cuts that would send premiums soaring for millions are also still there.

The good stuff involves some new money for the opioid crisis, some (but not nearly enough) money for patients at especially high risk, and some additional aid for insurers — you know, the same thing Republicans denounced as outrageous corporate welfare when Democrats did it.

The most important change in the bill, however, is the way it would effectively gut protection for people with pre-existing medical conditions. The Affordable Care Act put minimum standards on the kinds of policies insurers were allowed to offer; the new Senate bill gives in to demands by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that insurers be allowed to offer skimpy plans that cover very little, with very high deductibles that would make them useless to most people.

This change would be disastrous. In a special memo, AHIP, the insurance industry trade group, warned against adopting the Cruz proposal, which would “fracture and segment insurance markets into separate risk pools,” leading to “unstable health insurance markets” in which people with pre-existing conditions would lose coverage or have plans that were “far more expensive” than under Obamacare.

This bill would send insurance markets into a classic death spiral. Republicans have been predicting such a spiral for years, but keep being wrong: All indications are that Obamacare, despite having some real problems, is stabilizing, and doing pretty well in states that support it. But this bill would sabotage all that progress.

And let’s be clear: Many of the victims of this sabotage would be members of the white working class, people who voted for President Donald Trump in the belief that he really meant it when he promised that there would be no cuts to Medicaid and that everyone would get better, cheaper insurance.