Cooperating for better care.

Republican

Tag Archives

After 7 years of promises, still no GOP health plan

By JULIE ROVNER

For Kaiser Health News 

Republicans from the House, Senate and White House gathered in Philadelphia last week searching, among other things, for some agreement on how exactly to “repeal and replace” the federal health law. By the end of the second day of the three-day retreat, however, it was clear they were not yet singing from the same hymnbook.

All this comes after seven years of the GOP saying it would kill the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better.

House and Senate Republican leaders did seem to settle on a timing strategy for overhauling the Democrats’ healthcare law that could take them through the summer, even if they were light on specifics.

“We don’t want to set arbitrary deadlines on things,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.). “We want to move quickly, but we want to get things right.”

Rank-and-file Republicans said they are coalescing around a strategy that would not have a single replacement for the ACA Instead they foresee a combination of changes they can make to the law through a budget bill that only requires 51 votes in the Senate, regulatory action and executive orders by the Trump administration, and individual bills addressing smaller aspects of the health system that will follow later.

“If you’re waiting for another 2,700-page bill to emerge, you’re going to have to wait until the sun doesn’t come up, because that’s not how we’re going to do it,” Rep. Greg Walden (R.-Ore.), who is  chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told reporters, referring to the length of the ACA. “There’s no single fix. There’s no single plan.”

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.) earlier also described the idea of separate “buckets” consisting of fast-track budget legislation, administrative action by Trump officials and more traditional legislation. “We’re looking forward to being very busy until August,” she said.

Some of the individual bills that Blackburn mentioned are those Republicans have pursued for years, such as allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines and capping some damages in medical malpractice suits in an effort to deter doctors from practicing “defensive medicine” to avoid being sued. Rep. Tom Price, M.D. (R.-Ga.), whom Trump has nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has been a leading advocate of some of these GOP proposals.

According to the budget resolution passed by both chambers earlier this month, House and Senate committees were supposed to finish work on their partial-repeal bills by Jan. 27. That will not happen, as none of the committees in question has even begun work yet.

And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) said he was pleased that the House has recognized that the Senate will move more slowly due to its other obligations to vet and vote on President Trump’s nominees for the Cabinet and other posts.

“What the speaker has done, which I entirely concur with and the administration is on board with, is to lay out a game plan through the August recess of what we want to try and accomplish,” McConnell told reporters.

But while the members of Congress insisted that they were on the same page as Trump, that was not clear from the speeches delivered by the president and Vice President  Pence last Thursday.

For his part, the president stuck to his desire for legislation sooner rather than later. “We have to take care of the American people immediately, so we can’t wait,” he told the group.

Pence reiterated the idea that overhauling and replacing the law needs to be done at the same time. “President Trump has made it very clear: We need to end this law’s burden on hard-working families and business, and simultaneously replace it with a better plan, based on free-market principles and choice,” he said, according to the pool report of the speech, which was not open to the media and not broadcast.

And it remains unclear if the Trump administration will submit its own plan or let Congress work its will. “I’ll leave that up to them to announce,” Walden said.

Meanwhile, in a light rain, a group of several thousand protestors marched to within a block of the hotel in the center of the city where the Republicans were meeting, chanting “Philly hates Trump,” and “Facts are facts and lies are lies.”

Among the marchers were patients who have benefitted from the healthcare law and don’t want to see it disbanded.

“‘If they take away the ‘You can’t be turned down for having a pre-existing condition,’ I will probably not be able to get health insurance,” said Nancy Lowell, 58, a food-service manager from Philadelphia who was diagnosed with cancer last year.

Lowell, who said her cancer was treated with surgery, fears losing her insurance because “I still have to get a high-resolution MRI annually, and without insurance that costs over $11,000. Just that one test.”

And 31-year-old Andrea Tsurumi, a freelance illustrator also from Philadelphia, said she “doesn’t know” what she will do if the law no longer offers her affordable coverage.

She said the availability of the insurance without employer-provided coverage enabled her to become an illustrator in the first place.  “I’m terrified I’m going to have to give up my profession and find some sort of job to provide healthcare for my family,” she said.


Medicine needs more people like Donald Trump

 

Suneel Dhand, M.D., asserts that the medical profession needs more people like Donald Trump. 

He says: “I simply don’t agree with anyone who says the man is just an empty façade. His books, despite sometimes going over the top, do actually contain plenty of good advice and insights into success and thinking like a winner. They also make abundantly clear that Donald Trump is a man who knows how to negotiate and will always push for the best possible deal.”

“Strong advocacy, a clear voice, and persistence are needed to secure the best deal for yourself and what you represent. That’s something that most of the frontline players in health care have consistently failed to get over the last couple of decades. And whether you love him or loathe him, making deals and getting the best out of any situation is something Donald Trump has perfected to an almost art form when it comes to himself and his brand. Indeed, perhaps if people with Donald Trump’s negotiating and branding skills were negotiating an agenda for doctors or patients, there would be more times we would be telling people who are pushing health care in the wrong direction: ‘You’re fired.”‘

 


Nervous GOP legislators split on tax credits

wildfire

With a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Acts’s healthcare subsidies coming in the next few weeks, congressional Republicans remain split over whether to extend the law’s tax credits if the court voids them in most of the country. Some GOP leaders fear a firestorm of public anger if the Republican-dominated court and the anti-ACA House are blamed f0r taking away what many patients have come to like and depend on.

If the Supremes throw out the credits, we’d guess that many anxious  Republican lawmakers will  vote to extend the credits to buy the GOP time  to enact a broader overhaul of health law the party has long opposed.


Contact Info

info@cmg625.com

(617) 230-4965

Wellesley, Mass