BCRA
lborkowski | July 16, 2017Remember in the bad old days before the Affordable Care Act, when those who bought individual plans on the private market faced unpleasant surprises – like finding at out very inopportune times that their plans didn’t cover hospitalization or maternity care, or that they’d reached a lifetime limit and their insurer wouldn’t pay for any more care at all? When dysfunctional insurance markets meant individual coverage was effectively impossible to purchase for all but the healthiest or wealthiest? If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his way, we’ll be going back to those hated…
lborkowski | July 10, 2017While much public attention is (appropriately) focused on the Senate bill that would shred the Medicaid program, House Freedom Caucus members are pushing a proposal to shred other parts of the social safety net: welfare, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and food stamps, or Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). Both the Senate BCRA and the Freedom Caucus budget proposal aim to cut spending on these crucial assistance programs while granting large tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has put forward a budget…
lborkowski | July 5, 2017The Congressional Budget Office’s initial score of the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” calculated that 22 million people, 15 million of them Medicaid beneficiaries, would lose health insurance by 2026. For Medicaid recipients, though, the picture worsens steadily after that ten-year window, due to per-capita caps on how much the federal government would contribute. At the request of Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Bernie Sanders and Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, CBO has also estimated Medicaid spending for the post-2026 decade under current law vs the BCRA. They…
lborkowski | June 30, 2017Kim Krisberg has already ably described how the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” would gut Medicaid while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest, so I want to emphasize a few key points that are worth bearing in mind.
The Congressional Budget Office score of the Senate bill finds that over the next 10 years, 22 million people would lose coverage (relative to keeping the current law), and 15 million of those people would be losing Medicaid. The worst of the Medicaid cuts would come after 2026, though, as the per-capita cap on the federal share of spending rises much more slowly…