With Skinny Repeal, Senate Republicans Plan to Kill the Parts of Obamacare You Hate Most

Republican Senators’ long-planned Obamacare repeal was defeated. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a backup plan.

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If your business has 50 or more employees and you don’t want to provide them health insurance, or if you’re sick of paying a penalty for not buying insurance yourself, there may be good news for you soon from the Senate. It looks likely that it will soon pass a bill to get rid of both those provisions of Obamacare.

Republican senators’ original bill to repeal and replace Obamacare was defeated yesterday. But Senate Republicans are now planning a vote on a “skinny repeal” bill that simply eliminates two of the most unpopular provisions of Obamacare: the individual mandate that requires people to pay a penalty for not having health insurance, and the employer mandate requiring employers with 50 or more employees to provide them insurance. It would also repeal the tax on medical devices, which is highly unpopular with an industry that has contributed significantly to both Democratic and Republican candidates. And that would be that, at least for now.

Sources within the Senate told The New York Times that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell began suggesting skinny repeal due to dwindling options in the push to repeal and replace Obamacare (officially the Affordable Care Act). 

With Senate Republicans full repeal and replace bill defeated, McConnell is left with few good options for undoing the ACA. He will likely next bring to the floor a “clean” repeal bill that would simply eliminate Obamacare without replacing it. But some Republican senators have said they won’t vote for repeal without a replacement, so that bill, too, will likely be defeated.

That leaves skinny repeal as one more option. If they do succeed in passing it, Senate Republicans say they won’t leave it at that. They need some sort of bill to pass in the Senate so as to go into conference to begin the process of smoothing out differences between that bill and the American Health Care Act which passed in the House back in May. They’re hoping that process will lead them to a bill that both houses of Congress can pass.

Does skinny repeal mean higher premiums?

There’s a potential problem with skinny repeal: It might lead to higher insurance premiums which would mean more people would be unable to afford insurance. That’s because the insurance companies need younger healthy people to purchase insurance in order to balance out older, sicker, and thus more expensive customers. The individual mandate was intended to encourage those younger healthier people to buy health insurance and without it the Congressional Budget Office has projected that 15 million fewer Americans would have insurance over the next decade. Also, without the individual mandate, even more insurers might abandon the individual insurance market, exacerbating the growing problem of not enough insurance options–or none at all–for individual buyers in some areas.

Whether all that will happen isn’t clear. It’s also far from clear that skinny repeal–or any other Obamacare repeal–will ever become law. But since all it does is remove the most hated elements of Obamacare, skinny repeal does have the best chance of all the proposed bills of being voted in by the Senate. That would give Republican Senators a badly needed victory, at least for now.