Trumpcare went comatose Monday night, and the prognosis isn’t good. So President Donald Trump took to Twitter to demand that the Republican-led Senate repeal Obamacare immediately and start over on a replacement healthcare bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly obliged and released a statement late Monday saying he would reintroduce a 2015 bill that repealed large swaths of Obamacare with a two-year transition period.That bill passed the Senate and the House in 2015, but some Republicans considered it a symbolic vote since President Barack Obama promised to veto the measure. Back then, Republicans could get credit for attempting to repeal Obamacare without the consequences of a full repeal.But those consequences were laid out by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in January of 2017 after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democratic senators requested a full analysis. This analysis does not include the effects of a replacement bill because, at the moment, there is no such plan to analyze.Here is what McConnell’s repeal-first-and-replace-later would do, per the CBO:
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- In two steps, the law removes all health insurance subsidies and the individual and employer mandates to purchase insurance.
- It leaves in place all of Obamacare’s regulations on the insurance industry, such as protections for pre-existing conditions and requiring insurance to cover certain “essential health benefits.” Repealing those would require 60 votes in the Senate.
- After the two-year transition period, Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid starts to be rolled back in the 32 states that expanded it. The Medicaid expansion is expensive but has also provided coverage for over 10 million people.
- In the first year, 18 million more people would be uninsured. By 2026, 32 million more people would be uninsured.
- With the elimination of subsidies, people in the individual health insurance market would be paying double what they otherwise would by 2026.