Paul Ryan: Republicans will be vindicated in 2018 on healthcare

[Geee]

Washington Examiner

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Monday that Americans are rejecting the Democrats' knee-jerk opposition to President Trump and boldly predicted that Americans would reward Republicans in 2018 for following through on a healthcare agenda that, for now, is deeply unpopular.
In an impromptu interview to discuss the Republicans' four special election victories, including last week's crucial win in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, Ryan said the liberal strategy for dealing with Trump has been discredited. So, too, the speaker added, would doubters of his party's legislation to partially repeal Obamacare.
"The Democrats are in disarray. All they're doing is suggesting they're going to come and fight and resist, and I don't think that's what voters want," the Wisconsin Republican told the Washington Examiner. "We just saw four victories for tackling problems and addressing issues, and four defeats for just simple resistance — and that was the basis of their campaign."
The "resistance" is a slogan used by many of Trump's opponents on the Left.

[Valin]

Geee

 

This is Assuming The Republicans actually Do something about repealing Obamacare. So Far 5 Republicans are doing their best to see nothing (that has any chance of passing) gets done. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Susan Collins.

 

The Perfect is the enemy of The Good.

[Valin]

CBO: Senate Health Care Bill Will Reduce Deficit By $321 Billion

Budget office projects legislation would lower premiums 30 percent by 2020

Ali Meyer
June 26, 2017 5:20 pm

 

The Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, the Senate Republican replacement to the Affordable Care Act, is estimated to reduce the deficit by $321 billion from 2017 to 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office's scoring of the legislation.

In comparison to the Obamacare replacement, the American Health Care Act, passed by the House, this bill would save an additional $202 billion over this time period.

During this span, the budget office also projects that spending will be reduced by $1 trillion and government revenues will be reduced by $701 billion.

The legislation's greatest savings come from reducing spending on Medicaid and eliminating the Affordable Care Act's subsidies. Medicaid spending is estimated to decline by 26 percent by 2026. Instead of spending more on Medicaid, the legislation will spend more money on ways to reduce premiums and repealing Obamacare's penalties on employers and individuals.

The budget office says that the new legislation would lower average premiums enough to attract healthy people to stabilize the market, which was one of the reasons many insurers began to exit the Obamacare exchanges.

 

(Snip)

[Geee]

@Valin - Ron Johnson was on the news here yesterday (and I believe he was on with Hugh Hewitt yesterday too) and said he

didn't know yet whether he was for or against. He wanted time to actually read the bill (novel idea). I don't know if he made additional comments after CBO report or not.

[Valin]

Geee

 

Posted Here

[Valin]

Avik Roy RE: the Need For Senate Action on Health Care Repeal/Replace Now

Duane Patterson

June 27 2017

 

Audio

 

(Snip)

 

 

HH: And I’ve been making this, Avik, because for 18 years, I served on a local board that spent cigarette tax money on the delivery of health benefits to poor people. And we did so by building dental clinics, by opening an autism center, by providing an asthma program. We actually provided care like the neighborhood Christian clinic in Phoenix. I have a lot of examples in my book. Subsidiarity is what is necessary. Devolution of Medicaid to the state and local governments is what is necessary. But it seems to me that the Republicans are frozen in making their argument that they are pro-poor people, not anti.

AR: Well, you know, that’s why it was so, the Senate bill, again, is so much better. The House bill didn’t do that, right? The House bill, by offering people the same amount of assistance, whether they were poor or high earners, created, or helped create that impression, I think. And the Senate bill, again, they solved that problem. They moved the subsidies in a means-tested direction. The tax revenue is in a means-tested direction, which is a substantial improvement. It’s the right way to go. But again, without an individual mandate, none of it matters. So and there is one thing I will say that just leaving aside, you know, the CBO score from yesterday and the way the bill is designed, I think there is one thing they could do to improve the bill on a substantive basis, one important thing they could do. There’s always lots of things they could do. There’s one important thing they could do to improve the substance of this bill, and that is to provide more assistance to people to afford, who are at the low end of the income scale, to afford the deductibles in this bill. So under Obamacare, there were these cost sharing subsidies that you could draw from if your income was below 2.5 times the federal poverty level, which is about, let’s call it $30,000 dollars or below for a child with adult. What Republicans should do is provide a bloc grant to states to offer either health savings accounts or deductible funds to those individuals, because I think that’s going to be, that’s going to, if you’re at the poverty line, if you’re making $10,000, $12,000 bucks a year, yes, if your premium is covered, that’s great. But you know, if your deductible is $6,000 bucks, you know, you’re not, you don’t have $6,000 bucks lying around to pay for that. So that’s going to be an important thing to, in my view, to help those individuals get a little bit better coverage.

 

 

(Snip)

[Geee]

Paul Ryan: CBO score shows how many people would voluntarily ditch Obamacare

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday defended the American Health Care Act's updated score as indication of how many people would leave Obamacare if given the choice, and not a sign of how many would be forced to leave the program.
"What they're basically saying at the Congressional Budget Office is if you're not going to force people to buy Obamacare, if you're not going to force them to buy something that they don't want, then they won't buy it," Ryan told Fox News in an interview taped just as CBO released its report Monday evening.
"So it's not that that people are getting pushed off our plan. It's that people will choose not to buy something they don't like or want. And that's the difference here," Ryan added. "So by repealing the individual and employer mandate which mandates people buy this health insurance that they can't afford and don't like, if you don't mandate that they're going to do this, then that many people won't do it."