At Long Last, House Republicans Reveal...the same warmed-over nonsense they had a year ago [View all]

[flamingdem]

http://acasignups.net/17/02/17/long-last-house-republicans-revealthe-same-warmed-over-nonsense-they-had-year-ago-part-one

Yesterday was supposed to be a Big Day for Congressional Republicans, as they were set to finally reveal their Master Plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan held a press conference about it, and they even released a 19-page "Policy Brief" which purported to explain it to everyone. Hooray! They were hoping that the entire news universe would be singing their praises all day long.

That didn't happen, however, for two reasons. FIrst, because Donald Trump's bizarre, surreal press conference, complete with racist and anti-semetic incidents, pretty much sucked all the oxygen out of the news cycle. The other reason is that their "policy brief" didn't really include much that we hadn't seen before. As Jeffrey Young of the Huffington Post put it:

It was basically the same as what Ryan and the leadership outlined over the summer with “A Better Way” proposal.

It calls for replacing the Affordable Care Act with a much weaker set of insurance regulations and tax credits that are based on age, rather than income. It also proposes phasing out the expansion of Medicaid, and then transforming the entire low-income health program by giving states more control and reducing federal funding.

Like the Better Way proposal, this new paper doesn’t include specifics, such as the value of those tax credits, or the actual formula for calculating Medicaid funds. Ryan, in his press conference, said his leadership team had submitted proposals to the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation to evaluate how the proposals will affect insurance coverage and the budget.

That could mean Republicans have agreed on the numbers and aren’t making them public yet, or perhaps that they are close and just fine-tuning them.

It could also mean that, once again, Ryan is trying to create the illusion of progress, as he and other Republican leaders have been doing now for six years, 11 months and counting.

OK, so what's in the policy brief itself?

Well, first of all, while it is indeed technically 19 pages, 6 of those are title cards only (the cover page, blank back page and section titles with nothing whatsoever on them other than "FACTS", "POLICY" and so on). Several more pages basically just rip on the ACA for sucking, and 1.5 pages consist of footnote web links. The actual policy description makes up, by my count, just 6 1/2 pages of the total. "Brief" indeed. To be fair, I'm not sure whether that's typical for this sort of thing or not. I'm sure the ACA itself was only 6-7 pages long at some point in it's gestation...but I'm guessing that by the time it was actually voted on, it was a bit more specific.

Anyway, there's a bunch of other folks who have picked apart the brief in detail, such as this one from the Center for American Progress or this one from the New York Times, so for the moment I'll just hit on a few items which leapt out at me on the "Key Obamacare Facts" page. I'll look at the actual GOP policy part later:

25% average increase in premiums this year for the millions of Americans trapped in Obamacare HealthCare.gov exchanges.

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