Senate Republicans take first crack at Obamacare replacement
January 25, 2017 at 12:31AM
President Trump and Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are moving ahead with plans to repeal Obamacare. The GOP has campaigned on dumping the Affordable Care Act almost from the day President Obama signed it into law seven years ago.
With Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the repeal is the easy part. The real challenge comes when President Trump and Congress try to forge agreement on a replacement. U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) have established a viable starting point with their introduction of the Patient Freedom Act of 2017.
The legislation provides for three options: States could keep Obamacare, choose a new market-based system and keep the federal money or design their own plan with no funding from Washington.
“We’re moving the focus of repeal to state government,” said Cassidy, who is a medical doctor. “States should have the right to choose.”
The bill would keep popular parts of Obamacare, including requiring insurers to cover individuals with preexisting conditions, allowing children to stay on their parents insurance until age 26, and prohibiting annual or lifetime limits on essential benefits.
Capito said the bill also retains “improvements to the federal Black Lung benefits program, which is especially important to West Virginia.”
According to a fact sheet, the proposal also “repeals burdensome federal mandates imposed by the Affordable Care Act,” such as the individual mandate and the employer mandate, which requires larger employers to provide health insurance for full-time workers. ...
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