By Al Cross
Kentucky Health News
The health-care bill passed Thursday by House Republicans would end the expansion of Medicaid in 2020, limit the program's funding after that, and let states allow insurance companies to charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions. The House sent the bill to the Senate on a 217-212 vote.
About 440,000 Kentuckians get free health care through the 2014 expansion of Medicaid to people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. They would be allowed to stay on the program, which covers a total of 1.4 million people but has a monthly turnover of about 30,000 people going on or off the program as they qualify or don't qualify for it.
An estimated 1.8 million Kentuckians, out of a population of 4.4 million, have some sort of pre-existing medical condition, according to calculations by the Center for American Progress, a liberal or progressive advocacy group, and cited by Kentucky supporters of Obamacare.
To waive coverage of pre-existing conditions, the state would have to show that doing so would help the insurance market and would have to create a high-risk pool for people with such conditions. Experts say such pools usually fail to provide adequate or affordable coverage because they require heavy government subsidies.
"There are some estimates that very few states, if any, would go through the waiver process," Rep. Brett Guthrie of Bowling Green, one of four Kentucky representatives who voted for the bill, told Terry Meiners of Louisville's WHAS Radio on Wednesday. "If people want to go down that waiver process, that's something that governors and state legislatures will have to answer to their citizens."
The bill, titled the American Health Care Act, failed to secure enough votes to reach the floor in March and was tweaked to win support, first from strong conservatives and then from more moderate Republicans.
Strongly conservative Rep. Thomas Massie of Vanceburg, one of 20 Republicans who voted against it, said on Twitter, "The AHCA is like a kidney stone; the House doesn't care what happens to it, as long as they can pass it."
The other Kentuckian voting no was Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville, the only Democrat in the state's delegation. He said after the vote, "This bill weakens healthcare protections for most Americans and leaves families worse off. I hope people will continue to make their voices heard and communicate their discontent to their senators as this irresponsible legislation moves forward."
In a floor speech before the vote, Yarmuth said, "The question every member of Congress should be asking themselves today is, who in the world is better off because of today's bill? . . . Certainly corporations and millionaires, who will see more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts from this bill. And, at least in their minds, a few Republican members who are so desperate for some type of political victory they are willing to risk the health and well-being of their constituents to ram through a bill without hearing, analysis, or most alarmingly, any sense of morality."
Rep. Harold "Hal" Rogers of Somerset, the senior member of the Kentucky delegation, said passing the bill was the responsible thing to do because the health-insurance system created by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is breaking down. Almost half of Kentucky's counties have only one insurance company offering federally subsidized policies under the law.
Kentucky Health News
The health-care bill passed Thursday by House Republicans would end the expansion of Medicaid in 2020, limit the program's funding after that, and let states allow insurance companies to charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions. The House sent the bill to the Senate on a 217-212 vote.
About 440,000 Kentuckians get free health care through the 2014 expansion of Medicaid to people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. They would be allowed to stay on the program, which covers a total of 1.4 million people but has a monthly turnover of about 30,000 people going on or off the program as they qualify or don't qualify for it.
An estimated 1.8 million Kentuckians, out of a population of 4.4 million, have some sort of pre-existing medical condition, according to calculations by the Center for American Progress, a liberal or progressive advocacy group, and cited by Kentucky supporters of Obamacare.
To waive coverage of pre-existing conditions, the state would have to show that doing so would help the insurance market and would have to create a high-risk pool for people with such conditions. Experts say such pools usually fail to provide adequate or affordable coverage because they require heavy government subsidies.
"There are some estimates that very few states, if any, would go through the waiver process," Rep. Brett Guthrie of Bowling Green, one of four Kentucky representatives who voted for the bill, told Terry Meiners of Louisville's WHAS Radio on Wednesday. "If people want to go down that waiver process, that's something that governors and state legislatures will have to answer to their citizens."
The bill, titled the American Health Care Act, failed to secure enough votes to reach the floor in March and was tweaked to win support, first from strong conservatives and then from more moderate Republicans.
Strongly conservative Rep. Thomas Massie of Vanceburg, one of 20 Republicans who voted against it, said on Twitter, "The AHCA is like a kidney stone; the House doesn't care what happens to it, as long as they can pass it."
The other Kentuckian voting no was Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville, the only Democrat in the state's delegation. He said after the vote, "This bill weakens healthcare protections for most Americans and leaves families worse off. I hope people will continue to make their voices heard and communicate their discontent to their senators as this irresponsible legislation moves forward."
Rep. Harold "Hal" Rogers of Somerset, the senior member of the Kentucky delegation, said passing the bill was the responsible thing to do because the health-insurance system created by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is breaking down. Almost half of Kentucky's counties have only one insurance company offering federally subsidized policies under the law.
from Kentucky Health News http://ift.tt/2qGcorl
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