In late March 2017, House Republicans had to pull the American Health Care Act (AHCA) because they couldn’t cobble together a majority from the disparate Freedom Caucus and moderate factions of the party.  In early May they took another stab at it.  This time the bill passed the House of Representatives by a razor-thin (as the cliché goes) margin.  The new and improved AHCA ended the mandate[1], but allowed insurance companies to charge extra for people who let coverage lapse and then applied in a hurry once they got sick; granted the states the right apply for waivers if they wanted to allow insurance companies to offer plans with fewer “essential services” than mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA)[2]; “rolled-back” the expansion of Medicaid (which observers predicted would cut 25 percent/$880 billion in health-care spending over a decade); replaced the income-based subsidies of the ACA with age-based tax credits[3]; allowed  insurance companies to charge old people much more than young people[4]; and encouraged states—through a promised $138 billion in federal subsidies–to create high-risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions that insurance companies wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.[5]  The right-to-life-but-not-to-medical-care-once-born crowd insisted on defunding Planned Parenthood.[6]

Republican Senators, who live in a radically different political environment than do Republican Congressmen, didn’t like the handiwork.  Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell set up a baker’s-dozen of Republican Senators to save the party from an electoral disaster in 2018.  They are expected to sketch a fig-leaf with regard to things like Medicaid spending, and coverage of the Emma Lazarus people: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Your people with pre-existing conditions.”

Is there any way to make a Republican plan work?  Yes, if you aren’t a 100 percent Democrat.  The ACA expanded entitlement programs to provide health care to the poorest Americans.  It had little effect for most Americans.  It did not create health-care insurance for most Americans, nor did it seek to rein-in the rising costs of health-care.  Most people receive their health care through their employers or through Medicare.  The Republican plan poses no serious threat to these people.  Republicans are betting that health care lite for the poor will be politically acceptable to most voters.  Are they correct?

One contested issue lies in the effect on taxes.  Democrats jeer that the AHCA will lead to a $1 trillion cut for the richest Americans over a decade.  However, the ACA imposed a $1 trillion additional tax on those same richest Americans.  This casts into doubt the claim that the mandate is necessary so that poorer young people will subsidize richer older people.[7]

[1] This is an acknowledgement that many young people don’t want or need insurance, or—if they do—resent being ordered around by the government as if they’re the hired help.  There probably are about 14 million of these timid fugitives currently on the rolls of Obamacare.  Millions more have not signed up because the Internal Revenue Service does not require that taxpayers actually submit proof of coverage.

[2] This is a concession to the people who were promised by President Obama that “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” and then had the rug pulled out from under them.  Sad to say, attention to detail proved not to be Obama’s strongest quality.  See: “Healthcare.gov roll-out.”  Lots of times “big picture” people aren’t good at this.

[3] So people in their 20s would get up to a $2,000 credits, while people in their 60s would get up to a $4,000 credit.

[4] Up to five times as much, compared to the ACA’s limit of three times as much.  However, old people consume far more health care than do young people, so the ACA appears to be a taxing of low income people to support higher income people.

[5] “Health-care reform heads to the Senate,” The Week, 19 May 2017, p. 5.

[6] Still, last time I checked, condoms were a dollar each at CVS.

[7] “American Health Care Act: The winners and the losers,” The Week, 19 May 2017, p. 6.