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Divisions among Republican U.S. Senators over what to replace the Affordable Care Act with are causing anxiety among conservatives who see the opportunity to repeal the law slipping away.
The repeal of the ACA took another hit last week with the newly released “score” of the alternative American Health Care Act, also known as Trumpcare, showing it would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage by 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said. The AHCA narrowly passed the House earlier this month and has so far gained little, if any, momentum in the U.S. Senate, where some Senators are trying to write their own bill.
“Elements of a bill that passed the House this month have divided Republicans,” the New York Times reported Saturday in a story that hinted Senators may be ready instead to begin “overhauling” the tax code rather than pursue health reform.
The inaction in the Senate is frustrating conservative groups who see Republican Senators as too willing to keep certain aspects of the ACA, such as essential health benefits and guaranteed coverage for Americans with preexisting conditions. With the GOP in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, conservatives see a now-or-never proposition before them if they are going to pull off a full repeal of the ACA, signed into law in 2010 by President Obama.
“Why is GOP dragging their feet on repeal?” Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom wrote in a headline of a press release last week. “Those resisting repeal and replacement are hanging on to the guaranteed issue mandate, which is the heart of socialized medicine.”
Republicans are “running out of time” if they are going to repeal the ACA, the council’s president Twila Brase wrote last week.
“Republicans are in power today because they promised to repeal Obamacare, not replace it with a Republican version of the law,” Brase wrote. “Repeal was the rallying cry. So now, with Republicans in full control, why not just repeal the law? Why are 13 Republican senators discussing how to restructure Obamacare rather than repeal it?”
The 13 Republican senators Brase referred to have begun to work with the insurance industry to stabilize the individual insurance market given the number of larger carriers such as
“I don’t think we want the market to fail,” U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told the Times.
The health insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans, last week sent Hatch a list of recommendations that included ideas to stabilize the individual market. AHIP, which represents
A version of a plan Hatch and 12 other senators are working on would put off a repeal of the ACA until 2020, putting a priority on fixing the individual market to keep more insurance companies from leaving in 2018 and 2019. BloombergPolitics described the senators’ effort as a “more modest version than the House plan.”
But even the Senate’s plan to phase out Obamacare isn’t guaranteed the support of 50 of the chamber’s 52 Republican senators.
