Senate Republicans Have Not Delivered on Promise for Health Care Plan But Support Lawsuit to Eliminate Protections for Pre-Existing Conditions

A new report from the Washington Post this weekend spotlights Washington Republicans’ failure to deliver (again) on their repeated pledge to put forward an alternative to replace the Affordable Care Act. In a July 19 interview on Fox News, President Trump reiterated a promise that he and Senate Republicans have repeatedly broken since 2017: “We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks.”

Two weeks later, that promised GOP bill of course “doesn’t exist” — but the Republican lawsuit being heard by the Supreme Court is still plowing forward to overturn the health care law and end protections for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions. Republicans still have no real replacement for the ACA, and “no plan” to help the millions of Americans who have lost health coverage during a pandemic-fueled recession.

“Republicans have enabled this dangerous lawsuit every step of the way to eliminate the health care law, even during a pandemic, which would erase protections for pre-existing conditions, end Medicaid expansion, increase costs, and overturn life-saving consumer benefits,” said DSCC spokesperson Stewart Boss. “There is no alternative health care agenda coming from Senate Republicans, and there is nothing they do can change the facts about their toxic voting records in Washington.”

Washington Post: Trump keeps promising an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system that never arrives
By Anne Gearan, Amy Goldstein and Seung Min Kim
August 2, 2020

Key Points:

• Now, with the two weeks expiring Sunday, there is no evidence that the administration has designed a replacement for the 2010 health-care law. Instead, there is a sense of familiarity.

• Repeatedly and starting before he took office, Trump has vowed that he is on the cusp of delivering a full-fledged plan to reshape the health-care system along conservative lines and replace the central domestic achievement of Barack Obama’s presidency. No total revamp has ever emerged.

• Trump’s latest promise comes amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which has infected millions, caused more than 150,000 deaths and cost Americans their work and the health benefits that often come with jobs. His vow comes three months before the presidential election and at a time when Trump’s Republican allies in Congress may least want to revisit an issue that was a political loser for the party in the 2018 midterm elections.

• Trump’s decision to revive a health-care promise that he has failed to deliver on — this time with less than 100 days before Election Day — carries political risks. Although it may appeal to voters who don’t like the ACA, it also highlights his party’s inability to come up with an alternative, despite spending almost a decade promising one.

• Still, senior Republican aides on Capitol Hill who are steeped in health care said they had little knowledge of any White House planning for a comprehensive replacement of the ACA.

• On Capitol Hill, the president’s promises of health plans and legal efforts by the administration to scrap the ACA have created dilemmas for some Republicans. Of the GOP senators facing competitive races this fall, only Susan Collins (Maine) has said that she opposes the Justice Department’s decision to back an effort to gut the law in the courts. Other Republicans have struggled to answer directly, walking a tightrope between embracing a position that would go against popular provisions in the health-care law and risking the wrath of conservatives who want Obamacare repealed.

• And the pandemic has also only sharpened the relevance of health care in the eyes of voters — increasing Republican anxiety about doing anything that could limit coverage ahead of the election.

• With GOP majorities in both the House and the Senate, Congress devoted much of 2017 to trying to get rid of substantial parts of the law. But a succession of repeal bills ultimately faltered in the Senate. When the last one did, Trump said nothing.

• The administration has joined with a group of Republican attorneys general who are pursuing a lawsuit, now before the Supreme Court, that contends the entire ACA is unconstitutional. At first, the Justice Department argued that only part of the law is invalid, but the administration hardened its position to argue that the entire law should be thrown out.

• Despite the administration’s steps to undercut parts of the law, and the elimination of the penalty for not having insurance, some of the ACA’s main features remain in place. They include federal subsidies for more than 8 in 10 people who buy health plans in the marketplaces created under the law, the expansion of Medicaid in most states, many consumer insurance protections, and a rule that young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26.

• Against existing evidence, Trump says that will soon change. “We’re getting rid of it because we’re going to replace it with something much better,” Trump told Wallace two weeks ago.

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