July 13, 2017

Republican Health Care Is Now Very Deep Down a Rabbit Hole

Alex Edelman via ZUMA

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Mitch McConnell is circulating another health care bill today, and it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The original bill would de-insure millions of people, so the new one puts a bunch of patches in place. But those patches cause obvious problems, so there are patches for the patches. It’s a purely political exercise in vote-getting that has no connection to actual health care. Good luck to the CBO trying to score this Rube Goldberg contraption.

Meanwhile, we now have another health care bill, this one from Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham:

The Senate GOP’s push to rewrite the Affordable Care Act suffered an ill-timed setback Thursday, as two centrist Republicans announced plans to offer their own health-care plan just as leaders released an updated bill of their own….In a joint interview with CNN on Thursday, Cassidy and Graham said that they would take the billions of dollars the federal government now receives in taxes under the ACA and direct that revenue to the states.

….“Our problem has been trying to combine tax reform with replacement of Obamacare,” Cassidy said. “We’re giving the money back to the states. The states can do what they want to do. A blue state can do a blue thing; a red state can do a red thing.”

Um, what? Just hand big pots of money to the states and tell them to paint the town red? Apparently so. Here are the details from Graham’s website:

  1. Federal dollars currently spent on Obamacare health insurance — an estimated $110 billion in 2016 — would be block-granted to the states.
  2. The individual mandate and employer mandate instituted under Obamacare would be repealed under Senate reconciliation rules which only require 50 votes.
  3. The Obamacare requirements covering pre-existing conditions would be retained.
  4. The Obamacare medical device tax would be eliminated but other Obamacare taxes would remain in place.
  5. Federal Medicaid funding to the states will continue to grow in a sustainable manner, adjusted for inflation….
  6. Federal funds would be restricted to health care spending only. These funds could be distributed by the states in the forms of tax credits, subsidies, health savings account premiums, and other means as the individual states see fit to meet their health care needs.

This should go over well with the insurance industry. They will be required to insure everyone at the same price, but they have no idea what rules will be in place to ensure against a death spiral. That’s genius.

By the way, there are lots of other Obamacare rules and regulations that can’t be repealed without 60 votes, so you have to account for how that’s going to play out too. CBO is really going to tear its hair out over this brainstorm from Graham and Cassidy.

For a party that prides itself on paying attention to economics, unlike those spendthrift Democrats who think the law of supply and demand is just a suggestion, Republicans sure don’t want to pay attention to basic health economics. This stuff isn’t rocket science, either. Sure, the details are tricky, but the basics are pretty easy to follow. As near as I can tell, though, Republicans just don’t want to follow them. Why? I suppose because Obamacare mostly does follow them, so that makes them bad. Or something.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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