Politico has obtained a draft bill from House Republicans for Obamacare repeal. The draft closely follows proposals put forward by House Speaker Paul Ryan and the proposal Tom Price introduced last year. He’s now popular vote loser Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. It defunds Planned Parenthood completely. For everybody. No matter what they visit PP for. But more than that, it scraps Medicaid expansion and by allowing insurance companies to charge older people much more for insurance.
The Republican plan would also eliminate Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in 2020. States could still cover those people if they chose but they’d get a lot less federal money to do so. And instead of the current open-ended federal entitlement, states would get capped payments to states based on the number of Medicaid enrollees.
Capped payments is basically the same idea as a block grant. The state would get a set amount of money—less than currently under Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion—depending on the current Medicaid population size. If for some reason the Medicaid-eligible population increased in a state, it would have to do that thing Republicans falsely screamed bloody murder about with Obamacare: ration care. It would have to decide whether to keep covering children, or the disabled, or the elderly in long-term care. Which means, fewer people covered.
The draft bill is two weeks old, so maybe there have been changes, but if this is the end result, GOPCare will suck. And they will get an earful.