Health care experts said a skinny repeal bill would be a huge mistake, and the Republican Party has an incentive to push it through.
| AP Photo Trump’s ‘skinney repeal’ is ‘totally bogus,’ says Hill’s Hill reportersTrump administration has a ‘skinning board’ for health care, including Obamacare, according to Hill reporters.
Health care experts say a skinny version of the House bill is “totally baseless” and would have no impact on the law.
“The reality is, there is no such thing as skinny repeal,” Hill reporter Julie Pace said.
“It is a total fabrication and it is completely bogus.”
In fact, it would be an enormous mistake, experts said.
“This is what I call the skinny repeal, and it’s totally bogus,” said Robert Blendon, director of health care policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
The bill would have been passed by the House on Tuesday with only 217 votes, but it would have to be reconciled with the Senate to pass.
That’s because it would only apply to states that already have Medicaid expansion and the ACA’s Medicaid expansion in place.
Instead, states would have a new Medicaid program that would be funded through 2020 and expanded again in 2020.
The legislation would have also made the existing federal payments to insurers less generous.
But that was quickly reversed after Democrats objected, and instead of scrapping the ACA, the GOP proposed a series of tweaks that included changes to Medicaid payments, which would have boosted funding to states.
The changes would have required states to make a 30% cut in federal payments over 10 years.
That’s because the ACA capped the amount of federal money a state could spend on Medicaid.
But House Republicans say they wanted to keep Medicaid payments as they were in the final days of the ACA and the legislation would not have allowed states to reduce them to pay for expanded coverage.
The House bill would also have required insurance companies to provide coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
That would have caused more than 300,000 people to lose coverage under the bill.
A House Republican aide said the idea was to limit the number of people who could be sickened by preexistent conditions.
But experts say the changes would also make it more difficult for states to get the federal money they need to expand their Medicaid programs.
“The House proposal would have dramatically reduced the amount that states could get to cover preexistence health insurance costs,” Blendon said.
More than one-third of the people in the US are uninsured, according the Kaiser Family Report, and many of them are in rural areas where insurance coverage is harder to come by.
This bill is also going to cost us millions of dollars a year,” Blenden said.
The White House said Tuesday that Trump would sign a bill to help stabilize the insurance market by lowering premiums.
