A last-ditch effort is underway in the US Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with an alternative plan. It’s called the Graham-Cassidy bill. Before October 1 the Bill could pass the Senate with only 51 votes. After that, it would take 60 votes, meaning that changes to the ACA would need to be bipartisan.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – which evaluates the impact of health bills in terms of cost and impact on private insurance coverage and Medicaid- will need several weeks for it to evaluate the Bill’s impact, so it’s unknown how many fewer people could be insured under it or what the impact on premiums may be.
Even though the bill won’t have a CBO evaluation & its impact on commercial and group insurance and Medicaid as well as the fiscal impact have no objective estimates, the US Senate is poised vote on the bill in the coming days.
What would Graham – Cassidy do? In a nutshell, it would:
· End Medicaid expansion funding, turning the federal funding for Medicaid expansion into a block grant. States would be given a lump sum of money and decide what to do with it (e.g. help enrollees pay their premiums, set up a high-risk or reinsurance pools);
· Send states a fixed amount of money per Medicaid enrollee (a per-capita cap) starting in 2020. States could also opt to receive Medicaid funding as a block grant – a fixed amount of federal funding each year- regardless of how many participants are in the program (states couldn’t take a block grant for persons with disabilities);
· Repeal the ACA individual and employer mandates;
· Repeal ACA cost-sharing subsidies that lower marketplace premiums by 2020, and roll the funds into a block grant to states;
· Loosen the ACA’s requirements that plans cover pre-existing conditions;
· Allow everyone in the individual market to buy catastrophic plans;
· Repeal ACA taxes on over-the-counter medicine, health savings accounts and medical devices;
· End federal funding for Planned Parenthood for 1 year; and
· Double maximum contributions to health savings accounts.
We’re encouraging our members to use APHA’s action alert to let Senator McCain know what you think of the bill itself (especially the profound changes to Medicaid) and the process that’s being used to debate and approve this Bill. Here’s the text of the short letter that AzPHA sent to Senator McCain yesterday.
