Welcome to the Graham-Cassidy bill, the last ditch (for 2017) effort by the GOP in the Senate to Repeal-and-Replace the ACA with something that isn’t so … well … likely to help people stay solvent and/or alive.
A provision of the new Trumpcare bill gaining steam among Senate Republicans — a bill commonly referred to as “Graham-Cassidy” after its two leading proponents — would allow many insurers to drive up premiums the minute someone gets sick. This provision allows states to obtain waivers from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that no one can be charged a higher premium because of a “health status-related factor,” effectively allowing insurers to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions.
But that’s not all. The new Trumpcare bill wouldn’t simply allow insurers to discriminate against people whose health condition manifested before they signed up for insurance. Graham-Cassidy also potentially permits insurers to charge higher premiums “as a condition of enrollment or continued enrollment.” Thus, a person who is already insured could be forced to pay much higher premiums as a condition of their “continued enrollment” in that health plan after they are diagnosed with a new health condition.
So expect a lot more medical bankruptcy, and a lot more people dying because they simply couldn’t afford either the treatment or the insurance to get it.
The Senators involved piously insist that this will never happen, of course, because the states asking for waivers from various ACA provisions will have to show how they pinky-swear that people will still probably more than likely be able to get some sort of coverage in some fashion maybe somehow. And, as I recall from the last time this was proposed, the approval of those waiver applications is automatic unless Health & Human Services questions the plan. Which, under Trump HHS Secretary Tom Price, who was brought in to dismantle the ACA, seems unlikely.
So the thing that people — even Republican people — liked most about the ACA, the pre-existing health conditions protection, and insurance rates not skyrocketing as soon as you get sick, would be out the window. Despite that, I expect that plenty of Republicans are thrilled that ObamaCare is being gotten rid of, and will be shocked, shocked, to discover what that actually means to them, their friends, and their families.
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