U.S. House narrowly passes health reform bill

House Republicans narrowly edged through a bill yesterday that would repeal Obamacare, hoping to fulfill a seven-year-old promise to get rid of the legislation (Source: “House passes Obamacare repeal/replacement by 4 votes,” Columbus Dispatch, May 4, 2017).

The final vote was 217-213. This is the second time the House has tried to pass a bill undoing the 2010 law officially known as the Affordable Care Act. An earlier attempt failed to muster the votes, and House leadership chose to pull the bill rather than see it fail on the floor.

Lawmakers had wrangled in recent days over the Republican plan to water down Obamacare’s requirement that insurance companies not charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions.

At the demand of conservatives, the bill was modified to allow states to ask the federal government to exempt them from some of those rules. The revised bill would also allow states to ask the federal government to exempt insurance companies from being required to provide insurance with a minimum package of benefits. The bill would not directly affect those who receive their insurance through employers or through Medicare.

The House GOP bill would kill the federal subsidies and mandates requiring people to buy insurance and offer a refundable tax credit ranging from $2,000 to $4,000 to allow people to buy individual policies through federal or state marketplaces known as exchanges. The refundable tax credits, which would begin in 2020, would be based largely on the age of the person trying to buy an individual policy. For those up to age 29, the tax credit would be $2,000 per person, while a person between ages 50 and 59 would be eligible for $3,500 and a person 60 and older would receive $4,000.

In addition, the GOP bill would scale back a feature of Obamacare which allowed Gov. John Kasich to use hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicaid to provide health coverage to more than 700,000 low-income people in Ohio.