The other day it looked like the GOP Senate's BCRAP bill was going to take a hatchet to all 3 legs of the ACA's "three-legged stool", by getting rid of some provisions outright (CSR assistance and the Individual Mandate), weakening and slashing others in half (premium tax credits) and, most cynically, allowing virtually open-ended waivers which would allow individual states to wipe out many others (essential health benefits, minimum AV ratings, annual/lifetime benefits and the ACA's cap on maximum out of pocket costs). Here's what I figured this would make the "stool" metaphor look like:
So, like everyone else, yesterday I was poring over the BCRAP text, and one of the first things which caught my eye was the individual market tax credit structure table, to see how it compares with the ACA's formula. Here's how it stands under the ACA...again, these percentages are based on the benchmark Silver policy...
...and here's the BCRAP table, based on the benchmark Bronze policy:
After reviewing it for a few minutes late yesterday morning, I posted a tweet noting that under the ACA, a 60-year old earning about 300% of the Federal Poverty Line...roughly $37,000/year...only has to pay up to around $3,600/year in premiums for a Silver plan (9.69% of their income)...but under BCRAP, that same 60-year old would have to pay up to $6,000/year for a Bronze plan (16.2% of their income).
The tweet went viral...I think it was retweeted like 1,000 times or so over the next few hours.
The CBO score of the GOP Senate's #BCRAP bill is expected to be released early next week, just days (or, who knows, hours?) ahead of Mitch McConnell's rushed-through vote.
The biggest question from a process POV (that is, whether Senaterules will allow the bill to be crammed thorugh the reconciliation process) is financial; as David Anderson summarized the other day:
a) The Parliamentarian is most likely going to be stripping out significant non-germane to the budget items
b) $1 billion in savings must come from each of two committees (HELP and Finance)
c) Anything the Senate passes must meet or beat the $119 billion in budget window deficit reduction that the House AHCA was scored at.
However, from a political POV, the bigger question is how many people the CBO projects will lose coverage by 2026 if BCRAP becomes law.
OK, this metaphor will take a bit, but bear with me.
On March 16, 1981, CBS aired the 17th episode of Season 9 of M*A*S*H. For those of you too young to remember, M*A*S*H, set at a U.S. Army medical camp in Korea during the Korean War, was one of the most successful TV shows in history, running 11 seasons. I believe the series finale remains the most highly-viewed broadcasts in history. While M*A*S*H started out primarily as a sitcom, it evolved over the years into more of a drama with comedic moments.
Anyway, in S9 Ep17, "Bless You, Hawkeye", the main character, Dr. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce (played by Alan Alda) finds himself stricken with a sudden, unexplained and violent allergic reaction to something. He spends much of the episode trying standard medical solutions, but his fits of sneezing and coughing become so bad that eventually a recurring character, psychiatrist Dr. Sydney Freedman, is brought in to see if there might be a psychological cause.
Freedman asks Hawkeye about his childhood, and Hawkeye, among other things, mentions his cousin Billy.
Back in 2011, when Paul Ryan and House Republicans first attempted to privatize Medicare, a progressive PAC ran the ad above. In it, "America the Beautiful" plays as we see a young, Paul Ryan-ish looking young man pushing an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman down a nature path...and eventually pushing her right off of a cliff. Needless to say, it caused quite a bit of controversy at the time.
Earlier today, as the GOP Senate's BCRAP bill was released, this happened:
I spent almost all of Part One discussing the butchering that the GOP Senate's BCRAP bill does to the individual market, because that's the primary focus of my work here at ACA Signups, but the truth is by far the worst fallout will be on the Medicaid side of things...and most of the damage doesn't even have a damned thing to do with the ACA itself, since it relates to pre-ACA Medicaid.
I'll get to the Medicaid side in depth in Part Three. However, there are still a few more things I need to discuss regarding the individual market: The sub-100% FPL population and how it relates to Medicaid expansion.
There's a lot to absorb here, but this is the bottom line:
MEDICAID: It's MORE draconian and cruel to Medicaid enrollees than the House version...but delays the worst of it by a few more years.
Seriously, that's it in a nutshell. It phases out the ACA's Medicaid expansion more gradually...but as the years pass, would eventually squeeze even more people off their coverage...mainly via non-ACA Medicaid, which means that this bill really has little to do with "repealing Obamacare" and is mainly about giving massive tax cuts to the ultra-rich at the expense of the poor and low-income workers.
IMPORTANT: I cannot guarantee accurate federal data after 1/20/17.
...Most of the actual staff...the career employees at CMS/HHS, many of who've been there through more than one administration, will likely remain, and will do their jobs to the best of their ability, including trying to compile and publish data as accurately as possible.
HOWEVER, their bosses...the HHS Secretary and, I presume, the head of CMS...will be appointed by Donald J. Trump and confirmed by a 100% Republican-controlled Senate.
Given Trump's long, disturbing history of flat-out misstatements (aka "making sh*t up out of whole cloth"), and the type of sycophants he's likely to put into place, I can't guarantee with any certainty that the numbers spouted off by them are going to bear any connection with reality. Maybe they'll be accurate. Maybe they'll be off slightly. Maybe they'll be completely removed from any actual numbers. Who the hell knows?
An eternity ago (aka back in January/February), I attempted to compile and break out estimates of how many people would likely lose healthcare coverage in the event of a full, "clean" repeal of the Affordable Care Act (that is, a complete repeal of the ACA without any replacement healthcare policy whatsoever). I concluded that the total added up to roughly 24 million people nationally: Around 8.2 million highly-subsidized Individual Market enrollees, nearly 15 million Medicaid expansion enrollees and 750,000 Basic Health Plan enrollees (NY & MN only). I then attempted to break these out by both County and Congressional District. I went with a "clean" repeal because there wasn't any actual replacement plan available to compare with.
