The new Senate bill's major provisions

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The new amendments are really not improvements, quite the contrary. Even the insurance industry is now speaking out against the new law.

Health insurance companies have largely bit their tongues about the Senate health care plan, but they are turning against it now, warning that a recent revision would send premiums skyrocketing for people with high medical costs.

The insurance industry has been one of the few health care sectors to even tentatively embrace the Senate’s plan, as Vox has documented, but that has changed in the last few days. Their most influential representatives in Washington — America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association — sent a letter to Senate leaders Friday urging them to remove Sen. Ted Cruz’s amendment from the legislation.

The Cruz amendment, added in the revised Senate plan, would allow health plans to sell insurance on the individual marketplaces that does not comply with Obamacare’s insurance regulations as long as they also sold plans that did comply. Outside experts have warned this would segment the market, with healthy people buying skimpier non-Obamacare coverage and sicker people buying more robust Obamacare plans.

That would then send costs, and in turn premiums, spiraling upward in the Obamacare market, the insurance trade associations warned in their letter. They noted particularly that middle-class families who do not qualify for financial assistance would not be shielded at all from those increasing premiums.

Insurers shred Senate health care bill: “Premiums will skyrocket for preexisting conditions” - Vox

Perhaps the most egregious change this week was the amendment proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), which will allow insurers to offer bare-bones plans as long as they offer at least one plan that fully complies with existing Affordable Care Act regulations on preexisting conditions and comprehensive coverage. On Friday, insurers said the amendment was “unworkable in any form.”

But, somehow, it gets even worse. Not only are the bare-bones plans under the Cruz amendment so cheap that they would cause the cost for comprehensive, ACA-compliant insurance plans to skyrocket, but the Cruz-sponsored plans are so stripped down that they don’t even count as “continuous coverage” in the BCRA.

In other words, if you are a healthy person who purchases the cheap Cruz plan because it’s more financially feasible, but then you become sick and need to upgrade to a better plan, you would be locked out of the insurance marketplace for six full months until you were able to buy a more robust insurance plan..

The Trumpcare provision that could be a death sentence for people who get sick suddenly