#Trumpcare is quietly reversing the #ACAs Medicaid expansion, putting millions of peoples health

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American Bridge‏Verified account @American_Bridge 4h4 hours ago

#Trumpcare is quietly reversing the #ACA’s Medicaid expansion, putting millions of people’s health care at risk

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The most important part of the Republican health bill is mostly getting ignored
Don’t forget Medicaid.


Updated by Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] May 9, 2017, 9:00am EDT



The frenetic final days of the debate over the American Health Care Act in the House of Representatives focused largely on patients with preexisting medical conditions — but not on sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which have the potential take health care from tens of millions of Americans.

A massive expansion of the Medicaid program was one of the key pillars of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, and the AHCA rolls it back in a sneaky way. That rollback will deprive millions of vulnerable people of health insurance on its own terms if the bill is ever enacted in its current form. But the AHCA actually goes even further with Medicaid cuts — enacting broad cuts to the program’s spending that compound over time, offsetting a massive package of tax cuts for the rich.

And while leading Republicans are claiming that you can somehow take $880 billion out of a program to provide health care to the poor, elderly, and disabled without harming patients’ interests, that seems extremely unlikely.

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But the effort to smuggle large Medicaid cuts into Obamacare repeal is real. And its failure or success as the Senate takes up Obamacare repeal will reveal if this is either the last gasp of a fading small-government crusade or the start of a welfare state rollback effort that will eventually expand to cover Medicare and Social Security as well.


The AHCA sneakily reverses Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion

The conceptual centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act was and is the new health care marketplaces on which patients can buy subsidized, regulated private health insurance plans. This is where the famous bar on price discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions came in, along with the infamous mandate to purchase health insurance and, of course, the sliding-scale subsidies that are designed to guarantee affordability. ..........................