dagblog - Comments for "Good News! Congress GOPers prop up Obamacare, dis Trump "

Republican Senator Is on a

artappraiser — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 20:03:23 +0000

In reply to Good News! Congress GOPers prop up Obamacare, dis Trump

Republican Senator Is on a Mission to Rescue the Health Care Law

By Carl Hulse @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 5 (also has podcast available)

WASHINGTON — Senator Lamar Alexander voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act numerous times and wanted it gone. Now he is trying to save it — at least for the moment.

The Republican effort to overturn the law is in shambles and the insurance program itself is in serious trouble, leaving Mr. Alexander to try to pick up the pieces. And he is doing so in a way that is virtually unheard-of in today’s Washington — an overtly and unashamedly bipartisan approach [....]

[....] After Senate Republicans’ failure to repeal Obamacare, Mr. Alexander has set out on what he sees as a rescue mission to stabilize the insurance program by guaranteeing the consumer subsidies to insurance companies that President Trump has threatened to cut off, while granting states more flexibility to offer different insurance options.

He and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the panel who has been a productive negotiating partner with Mr. Alexander in the past, have agreed to convene hearings when the Senate returns in September and to try to push some minimalist legislation through Congress by the end of the month.

Even a small bill would be a feat in a Congress that has delivered so few results. But Mr. Alexander, a durable believer in the legislative process, sees it as a possibility, with the alternative being a failure that is certain to rock already reeling individual insurance markets.

“It has to be simple if we are to get bipartisan agreement by mid-September on an issue that has divided the parties so much,” he said. Stabilizing the markets for a year, he said, would provide breathing room to “tackle bigger issues” on health care.

Mr. Alexander’s political and policy challenges are formidable [.....]

GOP chairman opens door to

artappraiser — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 04:42:52 +0000

In reply to Good News! Congress GOPers prop up Obamacare, dis Trump

GOP chairman opens door to Democrats on ObamaCare

By Rachel Roubein @ TheHill,com, 08/01/17 08:34 PM EDT , with video of Alexander committee announcement

[....] Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who helms the Senate Health Committee, announced he will hold bipartisan hearings during the first week of September on strengthening ObamaCare’s individual markets for 2018. The goal: to craft a bipartisan, short-term proposal by mid-September. [....]

The hearings will give Democrats — particularly Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the committee’s ranking member — a seat at the negotiating table on healthcare for the first time, opening up a process that, to this point, has been tightly controlled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [....]

“We need to put out the fire in these collapsing markets wherever these markets are,” Alexander said at the beginning of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on nominations.

Time is of the essence.

Insurers must sign contracts with the federal government at the end of September saying they’ll sell plans on the exchanges [....]

In the process of updating,

artappraiser — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 04:25:22 +0000

In reply to Story was edited/changed @ 9

In the process of updating, ran across this from July 29, it's quite good

How to Repair the Health Law (It’s Tricky but Not Impossible)

Stabilizing the market, lowering drug prices and expanding access to coverage would go a long way to easing millions of Americans’ concerns.

By Reed Abelson, Abby Goodnough & Katie Thomas @ NYTimes.com

Story was edited/changed @ 9

artappraiser — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 04:18:58 +0000

In reply to Good News! Congress GOPers prop up Obamacare, dis Trump

Story was edited/changed @ 9:05 pm with this new lede added: The moves were a remarkable response to the president’s repeated threats to send health insurance markets into a tailspin. I edited my original post to change it to the new headline. Here's the beginning excerpt of the new copy, still very good news:

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans moved on Tuesday to defuse President Trump’s threat to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies, maneuvering around the president toward bipartisan legislation to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced that his panel would begin work in early September on legislation to “stabilize and strengthen the individual health insurance market” for 2018. He publicly urged Mr. Trump to continue making payments to health insurance companies to reimburse them for reducing the out-of-pocket medical expenses of low-income people.

In the House, two Republicans, Representatives Tom Reed of New York and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, teamed with Democrats to promote incremental health legislation that would also fund the cost-sharing subsidies.

The moves were a remarkable response to the president’s repeated threats to send health insurance markets into a tailspin. They offered tangible indications of cooperation between the parties after Republican efforts to scrap the Affordable Care Act collapsed in the Senate last week, all but ending the seven-year Republican quest to overturn President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement [....]