Quote:The Indiana Republican Party has requested that the state's constituents share their "horror stories" with ObamaCare, the Indianapolis Star  reported Tuesday. "What's your Obamacare horror story? Let us know," the GOP party wrote in a Facebook post as it sought to collect negative stories about the Affordable Care Act like higher premiums or insurance companies leaving the market.

Many of the people respondents, however, flooded them with stories about how the healthcare system positively affected their lives. "My sister finally has access to affordable quality care and treatment for her diabetes," one person wrote, according to the news outlet. "My father's small business was able to insure its employees for the first time ever. #thanksObama," another said. Another person claimed that "the only horror in the story is that Republicans might take it away."

Vice President Mike Pence's home state party push to highlight the Affordable Care Act's downfalls comes at a time when the Senate Republicans are working to get their own healthcare bill passed in the upper chamber. The measure repeals and replaces key provisions of ObamaCare and includes deep cuts to Medicaid. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed 22 million more Americans would love healthcare insurance in the next decade if the Senate bill is passed. .

Quote:The heartbreaking saga of Charlie Gard, a terminally ill 11-month-old boy in a London hospital, has electrified the American right in recent weeks. Charlie has an extremely rare genetic condition that experts agree is incurable. His parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, want to take him to the United States for an experimental treatment they believe could prolong his life. They have raised about $1.7 million to do so, and have found an American hospital willing to provide the therapy.

But Great Ormond Street Hospital, where Charlie has been receiving treatment since October, has decided that withdrawing life support is the only reasonable and humane option, and refuses to release Charlie to his parents’ custody. The child cannot hear, see, move, or breathe on his own, suffers frequent seizures, and has irreversible brain damage at the cellular level. Even the American neurologist working with the family has conceded the treatment is unlikely to improve his condition; what is more likely is that Charlie is in pain.

The question of what a society owes its most vulnerable citizens could also point directly to a moral argument for a robust, protective health-care system that takes dignified care of every citizen, not just those who can afford it. Instead, many conservative outlets are using the Gard case as an argument against a more protective safety net. The Washington Times: “Charlie Gard makes Trump case for speedy Obamacare repeal.” The Federalist: “Yanking Life Support From UK Baby Demonstrates Dangers Of Socialized Medicine.” InfoWars video I won’t link to: “Charlie Gard Exposes the Horrors of Single Payer.” These claims rest on fear-mongering over an all-powerful National Health Service, one that decides—in tandem with a totalitarian court system—whose life in the U.K. is worthwhile and whose is too expensive.

Raising the specter of "death panels,” these outlets have turned one hard case into a sweeping referendum on the inherent justice and effectiveness of socialized medicine. It’s as if the death of one child matters, but the death of thousands is the cost of “reform.” Or as if intervening in one complex and tragic case is heroic, but building a system that would prevent the suffering of many more is intolerable overreach.

It seems dubious, to put it kindly, that President Trump was thinking of those questions when he burst into the public conversation around the Charlie Gard case. More likely, he was keying into the rising attention to the child’s plight among his base and their news sources, including Fox News. Trump’s showboating is infuriating given his attacks on the kind of scientific and medical research that would make life better for children like Charlie. His proposed budget would slash funding for the National Institutes of Health by $5.8 billion. It would also cut Medicaid, which covers 39 percent of American children, by $800 billion; the Senate's version of the health care bill makes other devastating cuts to the program. Meanwhile, the U.S. infant mortality rate is already significantly higher than the rates in Europe and other developed parts of the world.

Quote:During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised, over and over again, that he would replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” that would “take care of everybody” and be “a lot less expensive” for consumers and the government. But despite claims by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that his latest version of Trumpcare would provide “stability” while “improving affordability,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price made a major admission about the bill Sunday: that the legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare would simply permit insurers return to the ways they used to operate.

On ABC’s This Week, the longtime Obamacare critic was pressed by Jon Karl about a provision in the bill pushed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), which would allow insurance companies to offer sub-standard plans. Karl noted that not only do more than 10 medical groups and 32 cancer organizations oppose the Trumpcare bill, “a rare joint statement by the biggest insurance companies in the country called the Cruz amendment ‘unworkable in any form’ [as] ‘it would lead to, ‘widespread terminations of coverage.” Price responded that he found that wall of opposition “really perplexing, especially from the insurance companies, cause all they have to do is dust off how they did business before Obamacare.””

Quote:One constituent who spoke out was Bob Cox, Moran’s daughters’ pediatrician, who joked that he knew the senator’s daughters before he met Moran. “The federal government is charged with the protection of its citizens from external threat,” Cox said. “The U.S. military provides this service, and it’s funded appropriately. We as a culture have not accepted the responsibility to protect citizens from internal threat, disease and injury.” Cox noted that taxes might increase to protect against internal threats of disease, but the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Quote:A Republican fallback plan to repeal all of Obamacare without a replacement health program would lead to 32 million more people uninsured than under current law, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. That’s about 10 million more uninsured than the estimated 22 million people who wouldn’t be covered under a previous Senate Republican bill to replace many parts of Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the Senate may vote on the measure as soon as next week, though support for it is uncertain. The full-repeal proposal is called the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act. It’s an updated version of a bill that Republicans passed in 2015 that was vetoed by then-president Barack Obama. The proposal would repeal Obamacare’s coverage expansion in two years, giving lawmakers time to come up with a replacement.

It [the repeal only] would also raise the costs for people to buy insurance, by about 25 percent in 2018 and more afterwards. The bill eliminates a requirement that all Americans carry insurance, which would mean that those who ended up buying health coverage would be sicker, causing insurers to charge more to make up for their costs. After 2020, “enrollment would continue to drop and premiums would continue to increase in each subsequent year,” the CBO said.

Quote:Tuesday I wrote about the GOP’s systematic efforts to discredit and disempower any independent voice — media, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Government Ethics — that tries to hold government accountable. Today we have a great example of the ridiculous propaganda that Republicans expect the public to swallow in the absence of such independent critics and scorekeepers.

The Washington Examiner has gotten its hands on a Trump administration “analysis” (I use that word loosely) of the Consumer Freedom Amendment, a proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). This amendment to the possibly-now-defunct Senate health-care bill would allow insurers to sell individual market plans that meet none of Obamacare’s health insurance standards and quality floors, so long as those same insurers also sell some plans that do.

Talk to literally any economist, including conservative ones, and you’ll learn that this idea would lead to adverse selection, a huge spike in premiums for sick people (who would sort into the Obamacare-compliant plans), a proliferation of mini-med junk plans that cover virtually nothing (which would attract the healthier people), and a possible death spiral. A more detailed explanation of this phenomenon is here.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office would normally be tasked with assessing the impact of such a proposal, on both the federal budget and health insurance markets: coverage rates, premiums, etc. Last week, however, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) suggested that there might not be sufficient time for the CBO to score the bill before Republican leadership’s artificially short deadline. Sad!


Thune thus proposed the unprecedented strategy of cutting the CBO out of the bill-scoring process entirely. Instead, he suggested, Republicans could just use an analysis to be crafted by either the Department of Health and Human Services or the Office of Management and Budget — i.e., the White House.

Which, unlike CBO, has a dog in this fight. As is completely clear from the pseudo-analysis that the Examiner obtained. Contrary to the predictions of economists everywhere, the HHS propaganda document claims that the Cruz amendment would cause insurance coverage to go up and premiums to fall. Astoundingly, even premiums for people in the Obamacare-compliant plans — which, again, economic theory suggests would get stuck with only the very sickest, most expensive Americans — would allegedly decline relative to current law. (Compare “2020 Current Law Enrollment Weighted Average” to “2020 Silver ACA Compliant” in the chart below.)

Quote:President Donald Trump's administration has been quietly waging a public relations campaign to undermine public support for Obamacare, former President Barack Obama's signature legislation, according to a new Daily Beast report.

Using social media and a series of video testimonials, the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Tom Price, is amplifying criticism of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and discouraging enrollment in the program.

Using funds earmarked for "consumer information and outreach," HHS has produced and released 23 videos of Americans talking about their difficulties with Obamacare, according to The Daily Beast. 

Ryan Stanton, a Kentucky physician who was featured in an HHS testimonial, told The Daily Beast that he felt pressured to speak more critically of the health law than he wanted to. "I don't think mine was the exact message they were looking for of, 'Oh, let's march against Obamacare,'" he said. "It was clearly an effort to push the repeal and replace."


HHS's website has also removed and altered information about the healthcare law. One page on the site, entitled "Empowering Patients" reads: "with skyrocketing premiums and narrowing choices, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has done damage to this market and created great burdens for many Americans." Twitter accounts run by HHS and Price have also been used to criticize Obamacare and promote Republican repeal and replacement legislation. 

Quote:The finding, pointed out by Axios health care editor David Nather, is on page eight of the CBO report on the recently revised Better Care Reconciliation Act:

Quote:The limit on out-of-pocket spending in 2026 is projected to be $10,900. (Under current regulations, the limit on out-of-pocket spending is defined by a formula based on projections of national health expenditures.) Therefore, plans with an actuarial value of 58 percent and a deductible of $13,000 would exceed that limit and would not comply with the law unless the formula used to calculate the limit was adjusted.

In short, the BCRA makes changes to regulations that will cause annual deductibles for individual market health plans to skyrocket — to $13,000. But other regulations set the legal limit on annual out-of-pocket spending to $10,900. This means the BCRA’s health plans could actually violate the law.

Republicans could amend their bill to fix this — if they choose to push forward with the BCRA, which for now looks like it’s not going to pass. But for now, it’s an embarrassing finding by the CBO.