This week Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, introduced a new healthcare bill aimed at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare.
The Senate is expected to vote on the bill next week, as any repeal and replace bill must be completed and voted on by September 30 in order for it to pass with only a simple majority of 51 votes.
Related Post: Senate digs into why drug prices are so high
This bill would mean a radical change to the current healthcare system. Here are some of the biggest changes in the bill:
- Repeals the individual mandate requiring all individuals have health insurance.
- Repeals the employer mandate requiring all businesses with more than 50 employees to provide an affordable health plan.
- Allows insurance companies to reinstate lifetime benefit maximums.
- Allows insurance companies to charge people with preexisting conditions more money for a plan.
- Requires insurance companies still provide coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
- Removes the optional Medicaid expansion for each state.
- Dissolves the federal insurance marketplace known as healthcare.gov.
- Gets rid of the federal subsidies to help pay insurance premiums for those that cannot afford them.
- Combines the funds for the Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies into large block grants given to each state to spend freely to improve healthcare in the state.
Funding in the form of federal block grants to states would continue until the year 2026, when funding would be cut off. Most harmed by this bill are those states that chose to implement the Medicaid expansion through the ACA. States that did not do this would see a large influx of cash through the federal block grants in the bill.
Related Post: Senate Republicans Fail to Pass ACA Replacement Bill
Because of the short time frame to vote on the bill the Congressional Budget Office will not be able to provide a full analysis of how this will affect coverage for Americans, though the CBO did say it would release a limited analysis early next week.
You can see how your state’s funding will be affected in this analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.