Quote:The HCFA, the last-ditch effort to uphold Republicans’ promise to repeal Obamacare, was something unusual in politics: a bill that senators would only support if they were assured it would never become law. The hastily drafted legislation, which was only released three hours before the vote, would have detonated the Affordable Care Act’s individual markets without building anything in their place — as such, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would drive 16 million people into the ranks of the uninsured, and estimates of similar bills in the past had projected skyrocketing premiums. No one wanted that.

Quote:House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said Monday evening at a town hall that “dozens of counties” across the country have no insurer on the Obamacare marketplace. But in reality, not a single county currently has no insurer and just one is at risk of not having an insurer next year.

Quote:Republicans on Capitol Hill like to complain that on health care, Trump didn’t really understand the issue, wasn’t engaged with the substance, and didn’t do a very good job of marketing their plans. That’s all more or less true. But the larger issue here is that Republican leaders — both Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, as well as Ryan’s predecessor John Boehner, and the chairs of all the relevant committees — spent years and years lying to everyone in sight about Republican health plans.

Ryan’s “A Better Way for Health Care” document promises as its very first chapter heading that it will offer “High-Quality Health Care for All.” And congressional Republicans claimed — over and over again — that they had ideas on the shelf to replace the Affordable Care Act with a new program that would address the public’s main concerns with the law. In GOPtopia, premiums and deductibles would be lower, with more competition and lower copayments. Narrow networks would be a thing of the past too. All thanks to the magic of tax cuts and deregulation.

If that were true — or even vaguely in the neighborhood of being true — then it would have been really easy for concurrent Republican majorities to pass a law and for President Trump to sign it. And while of course it’s easy for a political sophisticate to mock Trump for his naiveté on this point, at the end of the day his view that Republicans wouldn’t spend years claiming to have such a plan unless they actually had one wasn’t all that crazy.

McConnell and Ryan don’t go around advertising themselves as huge liars, after all. In my experience, their staffers tend to get pretty angry if you assert that they are huge liars. Consequently, they’ve done a pretty good job of getting most media outlets to report on their health care assertions as if those assertions are not huge lies. Not everybody believes them, of course. But there are certainly some demographic groups — white male senior citizens who watch Fox News are constantly high on the list — that are very prone to believing them.

Quote:Josh Hawley, Missouri attorney general and Republican candidate for Senate, says he wants to protect people with preexisting conditions. Whatever gave you the idea he didn’t? In his own words, from this rather remarkable 30-second spot:

Quote:We’ve got two perfect little boys. Just ask their mama.
Earlier this year, we learned our oldest has a rare chronic disease. Preexisting condition. We know what that’s like.
I’m Josh Hawley. I support forcing insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions. And Claire McCaskill knows it.
You deserve a senator who’s driven to fix this mess, not one who’s just trying to hang on to her office. And that’s why I approved this message.

Yet at the same time, Hawley’s name is signed to a legal complaint that would overturn the Affordable Care Act in its entirety — including the Title I protections for preexisting conditions. In fact, Hawley and the 20 states, including Missouri and Texas, that sued to invalidate Obamacare want to go further than the Trump administration. The states argued that the whole law — tax subsidies, Medicaid expansion, the works — must be overturned once the Republican tax bill repealed the law’s individual mandate. (Read more on why legal scholars think this is an especially ridiculous argument.)

”Plaintiffs are entitled to a permanent injunction against defendants from implementing, regulating, or otherwise enforcing any part of the ACA,” their complaint reads in conclusion, “because its requirements are unlawful and not severable from the unconstitutional individual mandate.” The White House has instead said “only” that the rules that bar health insurers from denying people coverage or charging them higher premiums based on their medical history needed to be thrown out. “Only.” But we’re splitting hairs here: The legal position that Hawley is formally supporting right now is that the current federal protections for people with preexisting conditions should be invalidated.

• The ACA isn't the only way to protect patients with existing conditions
  
• The Republican's have proposed a new law which purports to do so.
  

• That proposed law has big loopholes
  
• Fat chance it becomes actual law, big new healthcare laws come once a decade, at most.
  

Quote:But Rohrabacher’s words are belied by his actions. Last year, he voted for the American Health Care Act (AHCA), or as it is sometimes known, Trumpcare. That bill stood to cost 24 million-plus people their health insurance over a decade, while making coverage more expensive for people who need it the most — including the 100 million Americans with pre-existing medical conditions. To justify his vote, Rohrabacher released a statement lying to his constituents.
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“While a different approach, it is no less committed to covering Americans with pre-existing conditions,” Rohrabacher claimed, falsely.
With regard to health care policy, [url=https://thinkprogress.org/republicans-lie-about-repealing-pre-existing-conditions-protections-d6393ba7b654/]a number of Republicans are running on straight-up lies this election cycle. ThinkProgress has detailed how Rep. George Holding (R-NC), Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH), Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV), Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley ®, and Rep. David Young (R-IA) are all trying to gaslight voters in a manner similar to Rohrabacher..

Quote:For eight years, Democrats have been on the defensive from the official Republican position: Obamacare is bad and needs to be repealed. But this time, Republicans are bearing the burden of unpopular repeal bills that would have left millions of Americans without health insurance. Twenty Republican-led states are suing to overturn the entire health care law, and the Trump administration is joining them to argue that preexisting conditions rules specifically should be struck down.

To get out of this, Republican candidates are deploying some pretty audacious — and, you could argue, borderline dishonest — spin: We support protecting preexisting conditions too! We still want to repeal Obamacare, of course, we’re Republicans. But in some other, alternative future without Obamacare, we can pass a brand-new health care law that includes the same protections. This argument has a lot of problems.

• Should they win the court case, safeguards for people with pre-existing conditions is gone, plain and simple. 
  
• Not any of their past proposals to replace Obamacare did safeguard pre-existing conditions.
  
• Striking down the individual mandate tends to reduce healthy people in the insurance risk pool, increasing cost for insurance companies which they have to recover in some other way (hiking premiums, co-payments, deductibles, limit payments, discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, etc.).
  

Quote:Steve Miller, the top doctor at the healthcare company Express Scripts, put it simply. "High-deductible health plans are designed for wealthy people and sold to poor people," Miller said Thursday at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York. Miller's remarks came during a discussion about the high costs patients often pay for vital prescription medicines in the US. With high-deductible plans, they can be required to pay thousands of dollars for medical care and prescriptions before their health insurance kicks in.