If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt. Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”
UPDATE:
The CBO had not yet scored the AHCA at the time of this post’s writing. Now they have, and you can check out the full text here.
The most damning, immediate paragraph:
CBO and JCT estimate that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law. Most of that increase would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate. Some of those people would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.
That’s 14 million more people uninsured than right now, and the number would kick up into the mid-20-millions by 2020 when the Medicaid expansion runs out.
Of course, the administration’s not sure whether it trusts the CBO:
Must-see exchange btwn @PeterAlexander & Sean Spicer on wiretap claim, CBO claim, jobs # claim, illegal voting claim https://t.co/fVWoEtfDcy
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) March 13, 2017
There are a couple of things I want to look at in depth this week, and I’ll be breaking them out into separate posts to keep this from stretching to a full 6,000.
First up is:
The American Health Care Act (AHCA)
So, TrumpCare. Or maybe RyanCare. Or, as more than a few have pointed out, even better, Don’tCare or NoCare. The GOP finally made public the bill to repeal and replace the ACA that they’d been hiding from both other Congresspeople and the public since two weeks ago.
First things first. If you want to know how any new plan after ObamaCare is going to affect you and America at large, you’ve got to understand what ObamaCare is. That’s a tall order, but luckily there are a plethora of resources dedicated to helping you out. And Michael Goodwin’s very long comic from 2014 at economixcomix.com is probably the easiest and most straightforward to read. No joke (and his analysis of the new Trump/Ryan bill before the markup last week beats what I’ve written here on the details, if you’ve got the time).
The new bill, the AHCA, debuted to excoriating reviews from pretty much all sides. The American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Hospital Association, and much more important for Republicans, the American Association of Retired People, or AARP, came out against NoCare.
Why? Well, it wrecks some of the best (and depending on your perspective, only good) parts of ObamaCare.
In order to widen the risk pool and lower the cost of insurance generally, ObamaCare forced all Americans to either pay an ongoing series of income-scaled fines or purchase health insurance. Young, healthy people who might otherwise have gone uninsured would then purchase insurance and subsidize old, unhealthy people. In order to reduce the financial burden for those young people, the original ACA also provided generous tax credits for people making between 100 and 400% of the federal poverty line, which is $11,770-$47,080 for a single person and $24,250-$97,000 for a family of four.
Here’s Ezra Klein explaining that risk pool and ‘death spirals’.