I digress.
Anyhow, yes, the AHCA passed the House without a single Democrat vote because "RESIST" or something.
In all seriousness though, I'm having a hard time grasping why there's such exhilaration on one side and utter freak outs on the other. I say that because this current version of the AHCA is essentially dead on arrival at the U.S. Senate. If indeed there ends up being some massive overhaul of health care, the final legislation will likely appear vastly different from the current House version.
Avik Roy at Forbes analyzes the paths the Senate could take.
A working group of a dozen GOP senators, derived from the key Senate health care committees—Finance; Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; and Budget—has been meeting for weeks to contemplate how the Senate should proceed.
That could be a good thing or a bad thing. The best-case scenario is that the Senate builds on the House’s Medicaid reforms while replacing the Ryancare tax credits with a more means-tested version.
One worst-case scenario is that the Senate simply waters down the reforms in the House bill for a result much closer to the status quo.
Another worst-case scenario would be for the Senate to pass the House bill as is. That bill, if it were enacted into law, would price millions of lower-income Americans out of their coverage.
Not only would that policy result threaten GOP majorities in Congress and across the country, it would damage the credibility of free-market health reforms for a generation.
We’ll know soon enough which path the Senate has chosen.
I'm normally not very optimistic of meaningful reforms taking place when Republicans have control of all levers of power in Washington. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell surprised a lot of us on the right with his bold stance in the battle for Justice Antonin Scalia's vacant Supreme Court seat. Does McConnell and the GOP Senate caucus have one more big surprise in them? I'll believe it when I see it.
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Where do you get the idea that the AHCA is going to raise premiums, for ANYBODY? I cannot find that interpretation anywhere, and it simply makes sense that the more of the premium-escalating miscegenation that is Obamacare that is trampled underfoot, the better. Of course, success depends on what the Senate,and then the states and the Administration and, later, the Congress again, does.
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