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It's called the Cassidy-Graham-Heller-Johnson health care proposal

Quote:To pass the Cassidy-Graham-Heller-Johnson health care proposal — the last Republican-led effort to repeal and replace Obamacare — in the Senate, a majority of Republican senators, including two of the bill’s sponsors, would again have to vote for massive health care funding cuts to their own states, according to a recent report on the bill’s effects. Sens. Bill Cassidy (LA) and Dean Heller (NV) are advocating to pass a bill that would cut millions, or even billions, in federal funding to their own states, according to a recent evaluation from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The health care plan, which originated from Cassidy and Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), would block-grant Obamacare’s existing funding, cap federal health care spending, and send the money to states to form their own health care programs. In effect, the CBPP concluded that this plan would largely redirect money from states that expanded Medicaid to states that didn’t.

2 of Cassidy-Graham’s sponsors want to cut millions in health care funding for their own states - Vox

Quote:On Monday, 16 of the nation’s most prominent health care groups, including the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the March of Dimes, and the National Health Council, came out with a statement urging senators to oppose Cassidy-Graham when it comes up for a vote in the Senate in the coming weeks:

Quote:This bill would limit funding for the Medicaid program, roll back important essential health benefit protections, and potentially open the door to annual and lifetime caps on coverage, endangering access to critical care for millions of Americans. Our organizations urge senators to oppose this legislation.

Affordable, adequate care is vital to the patients we represent. This legislation fails to provide Americans with what they need to maintain their health. In fact, much of the proposal just repackages the problematic provisions of the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), which we opposed. Fortunately, the BCRA was voted down by Congress earlier this year..

The American Heart Association thinks the latest Obamacare repeal bill is terrible - Vox

Time to panic indeed, from Think Progress:

Senate Republicans are on the cusp of passing a bill that will eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars worth of health funding, destabilize insurance markets, and eventually phase out Medicaid in its entirety. Less than two months after three Republican senators stopped an earlier effort to strip away much of America’s health care safety net, millions of Americans’ health care is now in very serious peril. 

The new Trumpcare legislation — often referred to as “Graham-Cassidy” after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), its leading proponents — contains several provisions undercutting the Affordable Care Act. It eliminates subsidies helping many millions of Americans purchase health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges and Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, replacing this funding with a less generous block grant to states.

Then, this block grant abruptly disappears in 2027, leaving many millions of Americans with nothing.

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Meanwhile, the bill does not simply permit states to eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions, it potentially allows insurers to raise premiums on an individual the moment they get sick. Thus, a healthy person who paid their premiums all along could suddenly find those premiums jacked up to prohibitive levels the moment they actually need their insurance to be there for them.

Then, as an additional blow to people with individual health plans, the bill eliminates the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate — an unpopular but necessary provision that helps stabilize insurance markets by preventing people from waiting until the moment they get sick to purchase insurance. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), repealing the individual mandate alone will “raise the number of uninsured by 15 million relative to current law in 2018 and increase individual market premiums by 20 percent.”

In total, an estimate shared by former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services head Andy Slavitt predicts that 32 million people will lose health insurance in the next decade if this latest version of Trumpcare becomes law.
And that’s not the end of it.

Nearly 75 million Americans are covered by Medicaid, the landmark Great Society program primarily serving the poor and the disabled. The Graham-Cassidy bill would eventually phase out Medicaid in its entirety, causing that program to shrink more and more with each passing year.

This process would occur gradually. Though all of the funding that went into the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion is cut off in 2027, the bill only cuts the pre-Obamacare Medicaid program by 8 percent in 2026. Ultimately, however, it would shrink Medicaid so much that the program would be effectively worthless.

The Medicaid phase-out results from a shrinking cap on Medicaid expenditures. As CBPP explains, the value of this cap “would grow each year more slowly than the projected growth in state Medicaid costs per beneficiary.” For some Medicaid beneficiaries, this phase-out will occur relatively quickly. “The cap on Medicaid spending for children and non-disabled, non-elderly adults,” for example, “would rise each year by the general inflation rate, which is about 2.5 percentage points lower than projected increases in per-beneficiary costs for those groups.”

For other Medicaid beneficiaries, the cap will grow according to “the percentage increase in the medical care component of the consumer price index for all urban consumers,” which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will be 3.7 percent between 2017 and 2026. Yet CBO also estimates that Medicaid inflation will be slightly higher, 4.4 percent on per-enrollee basis. Thus, while the new Trumpcare bill will not phase out Medicaid for elderly and disabled beneficiaries as fast as it will phase the program out for other beneficiaries, the elderly and the disabled will also see their health coverage ground down over time.

A bribe for the Senator from Alaska..

Quote:On Tuesday evening, Robert VerBruggen of National Review noticed something odd: The financial projections produced by Sen. Bill Cassidy's office showed that, in 2026, his healthcare proposal would award each state almost precisely $4,400 in federal subsidy for each "eligible beneficiary" — except Alaska, which would receive $6,500, or 48% more than everybody else.

Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill has Alaska Purchase for Lisa Murkowski - Business Insider

Affecting the health and lives of millions without having much, if any, grasp on why. This should disqualify the Republicans from office for a couple of decades:

Quote:Not only is there no score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (and there won't be a full one before a vote), but many of the GOP senators who support the bill also seem to be unable to articulate its implications.

Jeff Stein of Vox asked nine Republicans about the policy implications were of the new Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson (GCHJ) legislation. Most answers indicated the senators favored a repeal of the Affordable Care Act and a vague notion of handing power to states.

Healthcare: Republican confusion on latest Obamacare repeal bill - Business Insider

Quote:Just look at what Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said about the bill on a conference call with reporters: “You know, I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered. But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.”

Pro-life party should kill this bill, instead of Americans | TheHill

Amazing stuff, just because they promised Obamacare repeal they going to vote for a bill that will tremendously affect the lives of millions of people..

Failing the Kimmel test, and flatly lying about it..

Quote:Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel once again waded into the healthcare debate on Tuesday, blasting the newest Republican attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and saying one of its authors lied directly to his face. Kimmel drew attention in June when he gave an emotional monologue about his newborn son's emergency open-heart surgery and how it gave him clarity on Congress' healthcare debate. Following the first plea, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana told Kimmel he would write a bill that would protect children with preexisting conditions, like Kimmel's son, from lifetime limits. The limits, before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare, allowed insurance companies to cap the total dollar amount of care they covered in a person's life.

Under such rules, being in intensive care during infancy could leave children like Kimmel's unable to get insurance for the rest of their life. At times, the phenomenon has bankrupted families. "These insurance companies, they want caps, to limit how much they can pay out," Kimmel said. "So for instance, if your son has to have three open-heart surgeries, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. If he hits his lifetime cap of — let's say, a million dollars — the rest of his life, he's on his own." Cassidy pledged to make sure that this would not come back under his system and that preexisting conditions would not cause people to be charged more. The senator dubbed this qualification the "Jimmy Kimmel test."

But Kimmel said Cassidy's new bill, the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson legislation, failed the test. "Not only did this bill fail the Jimmy Kimmel test, it failed the Bill Cassidy test," the host said. "It failed its own test, which you don't see very much. In fact, this bill is even worse than the one that thank god Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and John McCain torpedoed over the summer." In the new bill, most federal healthcare funding is handed to states in a large, up-front chunk called a block grant. States can then apply for what are known as 1332 waivers that allow states to relax some of Obamacare's regulations to bring down costs.

While the new bill does not allow states to waive the requirement that keeps insurers from rejecting people with preexisting conditions altogether, the waivers could end up allowing insurers to charge sick people drastically more money for coverage, essentially pricing them out of the market. For that reason, Kimmel said the bill not only failed Cassidy's original Kimmel test but also created a new one. "This new bill actually does pass the Jimmy Kimmel test — but a different Jimmy Kimmel test," the late-night host said. "With this one, your child with a preexisting condition will get the care he needs if, and only if, his father is Jimmy Kimmel. Otherwise, you might be screwed."

Healthcare: Jimmy Kimmel slams Graham-Cassidy GOP bill - Business Insider

While we don't have a scoring from the CBO as the Republicans are in such a hurry that there is no time for that, we know from the CBO's previous scoring of previous replacement plans that the following from the Commonwealth Fund (Business Insider) can't be far off:

Here are the major findings from Commonwealth's Sara Collins:

• 15-18 million more uninsured in 2019: The bill's repeal of the individual mandate, which compels people to sign up for insurance, would have immediate effects when it goes into place in 2019. Based on previous CBO scores of similar provisions, the jump in the number of people without insurance compared to the current system would be as high as 18 million in the first year.
  
• 32 million more people uninsured after 2026: The bill also would shift funding for Obamacare's Medicaid expansion and individual insurance market subsidies into a lump sum given to states every year. The bill, however, simply cuts off those grants after 2026. Commonwealth said the roughly 32 million people projected to be beneficiaries of these programs would simply be cut off after that date.
  
• Significantly higher premiums: Commonwealth also said previous CBO breakdowns of a mandate repeal showed premiums increases of 15% to 20% in the first year. "The majority of that increase would come from the repeal of the mandate penalties: insurers would expect that those who remained in the pool would be the least healthy," Collins wrote.
  
• Undercut protections for people with preexisting conditions: States could apply for waivers to relax some of Obamacare's regulations if it brings down costs. While the bill does say the state has to continue to provide "adequate and affordable" coverage for people with preexisting conditions, Commonwealth said the leeway for the waivers could lead to the elimination of Obamacare's protections for these people. "It would allow states to apply for waivers that would let insurers charge people with health problems higher premiums, and change other ACA consumer protections such as bans on lifetime benefit limits and comprehensive coverage requirements," Commonwealth said.
  

Any bill, whatever it does, so we can say we repealed Obamacare. 

Quote:Senate Republicans are once again just a few votes away from repealing and replacing Obamacare. It’s a plan that senators themselves struggle to explain and defend and that emerged on the public stage mere days before an expected vote. How have they found themselves here again, after their previous repeal bills failed in July? The underlying truth, the beating heart of Obamacare repeal that refuses to let it die, is: Republicans just want to pass a bill, any bill, to say they repealed Obamacare. Whatever standards they’ve set for their health care plan, whatever promises they made before, don’t matter. The policy is, in a very real sense, beside the point. Republican senators will tell you that themselves, in their own way.

Republicans aren’t voting for Graham-Cassidy. They’re just voting for Obamacare repeal. - Vox

No problemo that the effects of the bill are devastating to tens of millions of people (see previous entry)..

This is an outright shame. In one figure:

This basically sums it up, it's all driven by ideology, not facts, let alone any Christian compassion:

Quote:During a Fox & Friends interview on Thursday morning, Vice President Mike Pence was asked to respond to concerns people rightfully have that the latest Trumpcare bill will make it tougher for people with preexisting conditions to obtain and keep health insurance. “Folks like Jimmy Kimmel, they’re worried about the preexisting condition thing, ’cause this will be up to the governors to decide how the money is dispersed, who gets coverage,” host Ainsley Earhardt said. “Can you guarantee that these governors will make sure that preexisting conditions are covered?” Pence dodged the question with a fake Thomas Jefferson quote. “Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Government that governs least, governs best,'” Pence said, using a quote that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation says Jefferson never uttered.

Pence uses fake Jefferson quote to dodge critical question about Trumpcare – ThinkProgress

Look at the assault on Jimmy Kimmel for calling the GOP out over their latest healthcare proposal, none of which can actually demonstrate that Kimmel is wrong about his claim that the Cassidy-Graham proposal allows states to back out from a host of protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

See here for a barrage of tweets by rightwingers attacking Kimmel.

Quote:The latest Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare is going to result in less funding for hospitals, many of which are already cash-strapped, Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove told CNBC on Thursday. The Senate's Graham-Cassidy bill sets up a block-grant system to allot money to the states. A majority of state governments would take a multibillion-dollar hit from the proposal, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The big problem is that right now 22 percent of hospitals in the U.S. are "running in the red" and 55 percent of the hospitals lose money on the administration of care, Cosgrove said in an interview with "Closing Bell." "This is going to threaten the financial viability of a lot of hospitals across the country."

GOP health-care bill will hurt hospitals: Cleveland Clinic CEO