GOP leaders outline plan to replace Obamacare

WASHINGTON >> House Republican leaders Thursday presented their rank-and-file members with the outlines of their plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, leaning heavily on tax credits to finance individual insurance purchases and sharply reducing federal payments to the 31 states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan and two House committee chairmen stood with the new secretary of health and human services, former Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, preparing Republican lawmakers for a weeklong Presidents’ Day recess that promises to be dominated by angry or anxious questions about the fate of the health law.

But the talking points they provided did not say how the legislation would be paid for, essentially laying out the benefits without the more controversial costs.

It also included no estimates of the number of people who would gain or lose insurance under the plan, nor did it include comparisons with the Affordable Care Act, which has extended coverage to some 20 million people.

With the House proposal’s rollback of Medicaid payments to the states, it appears probably that the number covered would be smaller.

House Republican leaders asserted in a document describing their plan that they would not “pull the rug out from anyone who received care under states’ Medicaid expansions.”

But Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, expressed alarm, saying the proposals would “put a huge amount of pressure on state budgets and put many Americans at risk of losing health care coverage.”

Sketchy as the outline was, it envisions major changes.

It would fundamentally remake Medicaid, a Great Society program that provides health care to more than 70 million Americans, not just the poor, but also middle-class people who have run out of money and need nursing home care. Under the plan, Medicaid, an open-ended entitlement program designed to cover all health care needs, would be put on a budget.

The Affordable Care Act’s subsidies, which expand as incomes decline, giving the poorer people more help, would be replaced by fixed tax credits to help people purchase insurance policies. The tax credits would increase with a person’s age, but would not vary with a person’s income.

And new incentives for consumers to establish savings accounts to pay medical expenses still assume that workers would have money at the end of a pay period to sock away.

The House Republican plan would also make it easier for consumers to buy health insurance from companies licensed in other states, an idea long promoted by Republicans in Congress and championed by President Donald Trump in his campaign last year.

After the recess, Ryan said: “We intend to introduce legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. It has become increasingly clear that this law is collapsing. People’s premiums are getting higher and higher. Their deductibles are soaring, and their choices are dwindling.”

Price told House Republicans that Trump “is all in on this.”

Ryan’s presentation Thursday was meant to generate a sense of momentum for the Republicans’ campaign to eviscerate President Barack Obama’s health care law — a campaign that has been plagued by apprehensions, doubts and divisions among Republicans in the last few weeks.

It was not clear whether the plan as outlined would get Republicans much closer to resolution. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate health committee, said that he and other Senate committee chairmen were working with their House counterparts, with the goal of developing a “consensus document.” The House, he said, will probably act first but “will have the input of senators and the president.”

House conservatives are saying that any plan must begin with a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act and a replacement that looks nothing like it. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and the chairman of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, said Republicans needed to talk about replacement measures “in specific terms, not in aspirational terms.”

“We believe that it’s time that we make some very difficult decisions and move forward,” Meadows said.

Any plan that can satisfy House conservatives would face great uncertainty in the more moderate Senate.

The plan unveiled Thursday by House Republican leaders would make huge changes in Medicaid. It would eventually undo the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid and give each state a fixed amount of money for each beneficiary. As an alternative, they said, a state could receive a lump sum of federal money for all of its Medicaid program, or a block grant.

In either case, the federal government would gradually reduce the extra payments it makes to states that have expanded Medicaid under the 2010 health care law.