Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not been able to garner enough votes to repeal the Afrodable Care Act. |
WHAT'S THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The Republicans' and Donald Trump's attempts to remove President Obama's legislation creating the Affordable Care Act failed for the 60th-something time.
The Senate will not vote on the latest attempt to replace and repeal Obamacare said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Tuesday (Sept. 26). The deader than a doornail Graham-Cassidy bill failed to get enough senators to vote for it.
Three senators have voiced their opposition to the GOP health care bill. Senators John McCain and Susan Collins said they could not vote for the Graham-Cassidy bill, the GOP's latest attempt to remove any vestige of the Obama legacy.
Sen. Rand Paul, one of the leaders of the radical right, had said earlier he could not vote for the bill because it didn't do enough to undo the ACA.
Two million Asian/Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders gained health coverage or are eligible for coverage by the ACA.
"In our community, uninsurance decreased by 57% for Asian Americans and by 47% for NHPIs," said Chris Lu, who served as the Deputy Secretary of Labor during the Obama Administration, and Ko Chin is the President & CEO of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum in an opinion piece for Time magazine.
Insurance for those who have pre-existing condition could skyrocket, they wrote.The AAPI community, which suffers disproportionately from chronic hepatitis B, liver and stomach cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis. Half of Asian Americans and NHPIs are estimated to have diabetes or pre-diabetes – conditions that could lead to premium increases of $5,600 under Graham-Cassidy. The premium increase for a pre-existing condition of cancer would exceed the annual income of most Asian American families, they said.
One of the reasons the GOP was trying to ram this measure through without proper vetting was because of special budget rules that protected the legislation from a Democratic filibuster, allowing the Republicans to pass it with just 50 votes, plus a tiebreaker from Vice President Pence, instead of the 60 often required. Those special rules expire Sept. 30.
Just because the GOP will probably not introduce another repeal-and-replace bill this year, that doesn't mean some of the more conservative Republicans and the White House will try to undermine the program through the budget process by cutting funding for certain elements of the ACA, such as outreach efforts and insurance reimbursement payments. Already the Republicans' repeated attempts to repeal the ACA has made the market so uncertain that insurers have pulled out of some markets.
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