Leaders are bashing the Senate Republican’s replacement for the Affordable Care Act, a plan they say denies health care to millions of people, cuts Medicaid, jeopardizes health coverage and gives large tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations.
On Thursday, the Senate GOP unveiled its draft version of the health care bill.
“This health care scheme sells out the middle class, hurts seniors and children and devastates individuals with disabilities to finance tax breaks for the very rich,” U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said in a prepared statement. “Despite weeks of secretive deliberations, the Senate Republican bill is nearly identical to the House bill that raises premiums for middle class families, cuts nursing home care for seniors and will force children with disabilities to be institutionalized.”
But U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., disagrees, saying that Obamacare is failing Pennsylvanians.
“As taxes, premiums and deductibles continue to skyrocket, choices and access to care have dwindled,” he said. “The draft bill unveiled in the Senate today strikes me as an important and constructive first step in repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a better, stable, consumer-driven health care system for all Pennsylvanians.”
The bill destroys Medicaid, which provides health care for more than 722,000 Pennsylvanians with a disability and 1.1 million children, Casey said.
Doing so will leave children, seniors, and people with disabilities at ever-increasing risk, said Craig Obey, deputy executive director of Families USA.
The Better Care Reconciliation Act makes sure that people with disabilities will no longer have access to critical health and mental health care, said officials from the Disability Rights Pennsylvania.
“The decision to allow states to either Block Grant or create a Per-Capita payment will result in the program being eligibility based instead of an entitlement,” said officials from the Disability Rights Pennsylvania. “Individuals will only get services if funding is available, and if there is not enough funding then individuals will be placed on a waiting list. Waiting lists for services will grow exponentially and individuals with disabilities could be placed in life-threatening situations. This bill will result in even less funding available over time than what the House bill proposed.”
In addition, Casey said that the plan also includes an age tax on Americans between the ages of 50 to 64, weakens protections for individuals with preexisting conditions and removes treatment for substance abuse, something that Casey says is important in combating the opioid epidemic.
“This legislation will cripple our efforts to battle opioid addiction in our country, deepening this public health crisis,” he said. “This scheme will also devastate rural hospitals in Pennsylvania, forcing workers to lose their jobs and communities to lose their only hospitals.”
He also called the bill a tax giveaway to the richest people in the country.
Here again is where Toomey disagrees.
“This measure does not pull the rug out from anyone currently covered by Obamacare, and keeps the Medicaid expansion covering able-bodied, working-age, childless adults, while asking the states to eventually contribute their fair share for this care,” Toomey said. “Further, this bill works to ensure Medicaid is sustainable for future generations by modestly reducing, seven and a half years from now, the rate at which federal spending on the program will grow.”
Gov. Tom Wolf also sent a letter to Toomey, hoping to have an influence in the matter.
“For hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians, Medicaid is not a handout — it is a lifeline,” Wolf wrote. “It helps families care for an aging parent or a child with a disability. It is helping our state battle the opioid epidemic by diverting people from punitive criminal justice settings and into the treatment they desperately need.”
Medicaid also lets children with intellectual and physical disabilities attend school.
“This bill will all but ensure that Pennsylvania will not have enough funding available for Home and Community Based services and supports in any way that allows people to meaningfully participate in their communities or work,” said officials from Disability Rights Pennsylvania. “Optional services such as employment, person-driven services and home and community based long-term supports would not be required to be provided by the state. People with disabilities will have no guarantee that any home and community based services will be available ten years from now.”
Andy Carter, president and CEO of The Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, said that the House-passed American Health Care Act would impact Pennsylvania harder than other states.
“The Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect, but it provides more than 1.1 million Pennsylvanians with access to reliable health care and helps the commonwealth’s hospitals work to improve their care delivery systems. Any effort to repeal or replace it must protect patients by preserving access to affordable, dependable health care coverage,” he said.
Obey said that Senate Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves.
“After insisting they would do better than the House of Representatives, they have proposed a repeal plan that is more harmful and equally heartless,” he said. “This disastrous bill, ironically called ‘Better Care,’ does not make health care better for our kids and families; it does the opposite.”
He urges people to not be led astray by false comparisons between the Senate and the House bill.
“The real comparison should be made with the health care people receive now and are guaranteed in the future under current law. Compared to that benchmark, this proposal is an abysmal failure,” Obey said.
