Let’s see if this does the trick.
House Republican leaders, looking to jump start their floundering effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, on Thursday said they were proposing creating a $15 billion federal high-risk pool that would provide insurance coverage to Americans with pre-existing and often serious health issues.
Speaker Paul Ryan said the provision would “lower premiums” for other, healthier people who buy individual health plans by shifting the risk of covering higher health-care users to the federal risk pool.
Ryan, R-Wisc., also said it “gets us closer together, closer to that consensus” needed to pass the GOP replacement bill.
But, “I want to be clear: we still have more work to do,” Ryan told reporters.
The federal pool, which would be funded with $15 billion, would be replaced by individual state-run high-risk pools in 2020.
It is far from clear whether the inclusion of the provision — which is based on the state of Maine’s high-risk pool — in the American Health Care Act bill will do enough to garner the Republican votes needed to pass that legislation, and send it to the Senate for review.
Rep. Kevin Brady, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said, “We’re making a small but important step,” with the provision. But he echoed Ryan in saying conversations are continuing within the GOP caucus on what can be done to achieve consensus on the bill.
State-run high-risk pools have been criticized by Obamacare advocates as having been ineffective at covering the health-care needs of many people who before the Affordable Care Act were unable to afford private insurance plans.
An article on HealthAffairs Blog in February, “States Be Warned: High-Risk Pools Offer Little Help at A High Cost,” said that “high-risk pools’ flaws may be more fatal than previously thought.”
Larry Levitt, an Obamacare expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tweeted that the new provision is not likely to achieve the stated goals of lowering insurance premiums for individuals not covered by the pool.
The Republican bill has been stalled in the House for more than two weeks. On March 24, in an embarrassing setback for the GOP leadership and President Donald Trump, Ryan had to pull the bill from the floor of the House right before a scheduled vote because a group of between 20 to 40 Republicans were expected to vote against the plan.
Since then, leaders have been meeting with the conservative and moderate holdouts to discuss possible changes to the bill to win their votes.
An effort to get consensus on the bill so that it could be voted on before the House goes into recess for two weeks on Friday appears to have failed.
A number of Conservative Republicans have opposed the ACHA because they believe it does not go far enough toward repealing Obamacare. But some moderate GOP congressmen have opposed it because it would too drastically roll back gains in insurance coverage seen under Obamacare.
That schism, coupled with total opposition to the bill by the Democratic minority in the House, has put the GOP in the awkward position of being unable, for now, to achieve their long-desired goal of gutting the ACA, despite having majority control of Congress.