Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
GOP Unveils Tweaked Health Care Bill In Its Attempt To Woo Reluctant Senators
Senate Republican leaders on Thursday unveiled a fresh proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, revising their bill to help hold down insurance costs for consumers while allowing insurers to sell new low-cost, stripped down policies. (Pear and Kaplan, 7/13)
Republican senators have added a set of changes to their bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. These changes are efforts to appease different groups of senators and move the bill closer to a vote. At least 50 of the 52 Republican senators must support the bill for it to pass. (Park, Parlapiano and Sanger-Katz, 7/13)
The latest changes to the Senate Republican health care bill are geared to increasing access to bare-bones private insurance. There's also an additional $45 billion to help states confronting the opioid epidemic. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would keep in place Medicaid cuts that GOP governors and Senate moderates have objected to. No Democrats are supporting the plan. (Alonso-Zaldivar, 7/13)
The bill would earmark an additional $70 billion in federal money to help stabilize health insurance markets across the country, funded in part by preserving two Obamacare taxes on wealthy Americans that the previous GOP legislation eliminated. And in an effort to woo several GOP senators from states dependent on Medicaid to address the opioid crisis, McConnell earmarked an additional $45 billion in the bill to confront the epidemic. (Mascaro and Levey, 7/13)
The change comes on top of $112 billion provided for the same purpose in an earlier measure by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. That effort stalled two weeks ago due to a lack of support from rival moderate and conservative Republicans. (Litvan and Dennis, 7/13)
Republican senators’ latest effort to repeal and replace Obamacare still fails to address a key complaint about the 2010 health law: Patients are using too much of their own money to pay for care. The bill, rolled out anew on Thursday after a raft of Republican defections threatened to sink the original legislation, faces a tough path to becoming law. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants a vote next week, but two GOP lawmakers immediately rejected the revised plan, and losing the support of a third Republican could doom the measure. The Congressional Budget Office will release a score of the rewritten legislation as soon as Monday. (Tracer and Edney, 7/14)
The latest Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate’s revised health care bill won’t be available until next week, but the overarching trend of the three GOP plans analyzed so far is clear — more Americans will be uninsured and the majority of them will be poor. (Frostenson, 7/14)
Senate Republicans are now awaiting a new score of the revised legislation from the CBO, which could come early next week. (Sullivan, 7/13)
Here are some of those big changes that this new version of the bill would make to the original BCRA, and what they would mean. (Kurtzleben, 7/13)