House narrowly passes the AHCA by 2 votes, GOP spikes ball on the 50-yard line and goes off to celebrate an almost victory with cases of Bud Light in the WH Rose Garden.
The bill was passed without providing the legislative text to the press and public, only 3 hours of debate, no markups or additional amendments allowed, and no scoring from the CBO. We don't fully know what it says and what it might cost. And before someone quotes Pelosi about having to pass the ACA in order to know what's in it: the full text of THAT bill was available for review for months and took almost a year to pass. It wasn't rammed through in a couple of weeks.
Paul Ryan on MSNBC in 2009 on the Democratic effort to move the ACA: "I don’t think we should pass bills that we haven’t read and don’t know what they cost.”
Did you mean bills like this one, Paul?
The CBO said they will have a scoring on the bill either next week or the following, and maybe we'll actually get a chance to see the bill itself between now and then. We know so far that Medicare expansion is being rolled back, states can opt-out of requiring coverage for preexisting conditions and essential benefits, and Congress and their staff are exempt from those waivers (they get to keep what was in Obamacare; you may not, depending on where you live) - that loophole was not closed. There was a report from the WSJ this morning that a last-minute addition was slipped in that would allow large companies to who provide health care to employees to use the waiver from any state to remove preexisting conditions and essential benefits from the policies they offer and to reinstate lifetime caps on benefits. Until we see the text of the bill, we won't know if that's correct.
And just to add the cherry to the top of this dung heap, some of the provisions apparently violate the rules of budget reconciliation, which means they will be thrown out by the Senate parliamentarian before the Senate even starts to review the bill. Senate leadership said this afternoon that they won't vote on this bill and will instead write their own.
Here we go again...
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