Conservative group outlines new plan to roll back Obamacare

WASHINGTON — In a bid to revive the Republican effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act, a group of leading conservative health care advocates is proposing a new strategy to overhaul the law.

The plan, outlined in a seven-page blueprint unveiled Tuesday, faces long odds on Capitol Hill, where GOPleaders remain wary of reopening the health care debate after last year’s failed repeal efforts embarrassed the party and fueled a broad public backlash.

But the new call underscores how committed many Republicans remain to scrapping the 2010 law, often called Obamacare.

And the plan’s recommendations may serve as a guidepost for GOP lawmakers next year, should the party retain control of the House and Senate after this fall’s midterm elections.

“It’s time that Congress provided relief from Obamacare’s higher costs and reduced choices,” notes the report, titled “The Health Care Choices Proposal.”

The report’s authors, from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks, said they hope GOP lawmakers will pass legislation before the election. Rallying anti- Obamacare sentiments has long been an effective GOP campaign slogan and some conservatives are eager to show supporters that they have not given up on repealing the law.

The core of the plan is a proposal to shift hundreds of billions of dollars provided by the health care law to expand coverage into block grants to states. A similar concept was rejected by Congress last year.

The new approach would scrap many of the current law’s insurance protections, including its system of guaranteeing coverage to low-income Americans through either Medicaid or subsidized commercial insurance.

With the block grant of federal funds, states could craft their own systems for providing coverage, though with several requirements. These include a mandate that at least half of the money be used to help low-income people and that half be used for commercial health insurance, rather than a government program. These two pots of money overlap.

But Republicans risk a backlash if they restart their repeal push, as polls show Americans are increasingly supportive of the health care law’s protections.

This new proposal leaves out crucial details about how such a proposal would work, including how the formula for allocating money to states would be structured. Authors of the report said they would let lawmakers work that out.

Many of the repeal proposals envisioned not only rolling back the current law but restricting federal funding for Medicaid, which covers more than 70 million low-income Americans.