Avik Roy: Senate Healthcare Bill is Actually Pretty Awesome
I wouldn't go as far as "awesome", unless using the word awesome to annoy @hjmick because he doesn't like the use of the word awesome. That's awesome.
I do think it's 30000% better than Obamacare. It's better than everything else we have seen prior. But it has plenty of room for improvement.
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Conservative Wonk Avik Roy: The Senate Healthcare Bill is Actually Pretty Awesome
Having hit the Senate GOP's healthcare bill pretty hard last evening, I feel obliged to present a much sunnier assessment for your edification and consideration. Avik Roy, a conservative healthcare policy expert whose work we have cited on many occasions is a big fan of the new proposal, taking to Twitter to declare it a legislative triumph. Agree or disagree -- and I'll do a bit of both below -- the profane, unhinged, substanceless replies from leftists accusing Roy of supporting murder, with more than a dash or two of overt racism, are appalling. Many liberals appear incapable of good-faith debate over good-faith policy differences. More on that in a moment, too. But first, Roy's take:
A few highlights from his Forbes analysis, published this morning:
In March, when House Republicans published their bill to replace Obamacare—the American Health Care Act—I described it in Forbes this way: “GOP’s Obamacare Replacement Will Make Coverage Unaffordable For Millions—Otherwise, It’s Great.” I meant it. There were great things about the House bill, in particular its far-reaching reforms of the Medicaid program. But Paul Ryan’s bill contained a fatal flaw. Its flat tax credits, which provided identical assistance to the poor and the wealthy, would price millions of near-elderly low-income workers out of the insurance market and trap millions more in poverty. Fortunately, buried in the House bill was a way out of the morass. Section 202 of the bill contains a transitional schedule of tax credits that was meant to serve as a bridge between the old Obamacare system, ending in 2017, and the new Paul Ryan system, beginning in 2020.
It turns out that if you simply kept that bridge in force, and tossed overboard the Paul Ryan flat tax credit, you’d solve all of these problems with the House bill. By making that change, the near-elderly working poor would be able to afford coverage, and the poverty trap would be eliminated. And that’s precisely what the Senate bill did! Section 102 of the Senate bill—the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017—closely mirrors Section 202 of the House bill, with age- and means-tested tax credits up to 350 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. Making this change not only solves the problems I described above. It also makes it easier to reform the Medicaid program.
I should note at this point that one of my policy concerns about the House-passed bill is that it would hang lower-income near-seniors out to dry with skimpy tax credits, pricing many of them out of affordable coverage. This change, and it's a significant one, addresses that problem. There's an argument to be made that the Senate bill overcompensates, applying a tax credit framework that closely resembles Obamacare to the entire replacement law, rather than more narrowly targeting assistance to populations who would be disproportionately impacted under the House's age-based system. There are good reasons why many conservatives are objecting that "repeal" utilizes a whole lot of Obamacare's plumbing. Roy goes to cheer the proposal's Medicaid reforms, talking up vastly increased flexibility for states, and explaining why the system is failing so many people as it's currently constituted. He also briefly touches on my number one problem with the Senate bill:
Rest here - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guyben...esome-n2345326
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Originally Posted by hjmick
I do use the word often, if not probably too much. 
