Thread by @MEPFuller

As much as Democrats are running on health care, I still feel like a few aspects of the GOP health care bill have been lost to time.

We all know it risked raising prices on people with pre-existing conditions, but it did a lot more than that.

A short thread:

First of all, yes, the GOP health care bill would have undermined protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Despite what some Republicans are saying now, a key part of the bill was allowing states to waive certain protections if they set up high-risk pools.

One item we now don't hear about enough is how the AHCA would have changed Essential Health Benefits.

EHBs are a list of 10 services insurers must cover, like emergency services, prescription drugs and maternity care.

AHCA would have allowed states to redefine EHBs w/ a waiver.

The EHB provisions are particularly interesting because it could have dramatically changed insurance for people on employer-sponsored plans.

Essentially, if your state got a waiver to redefine EHBs, insurers could have decided things like hospitalization wouldn't be covered.

Another huge item we don't talk about enough is the Medicaid cuts.

The AHCA would have cut over $800 billion in funding for Medicaid, resulting in 14 million fewer people with insurance.

Think about that: The GOP health care bill contained an $800 billion cut to Medicaid.

The AHCA would have also allowed states to convert Medicaid to a block grant program. That would have inevitably raised prices on Medicaid recipients.

And states would have also likely had to tighten eligibility requirements and reduced benefits to make the cuts work.

The AHCA would have also allowed insurers to charge older people a lot more than they charge younger people.

Under current law, insurers can charge older people three times as much as the young. Under the AHCA, insurers could have charged older people five times as much.

The AHCA also would have decreased the tax credits to pay for insurance for some people.

For some states — like Alaska — that would have been a huge deal, because the bill also would have made the tax credits less dependent on differing prices in states.

Essentially, there was a more rigid formula for the tax credits in the AHCA. The tax credits were more determined on age and income rather than how much insurance costs in your state.

So for some people, that could have also dramatically raised prices.

The bill also would have defunded Planned Parenthood.

(It very cleverly did this by preventing federal funds from going to an organization that met very specific criteria. The CBO report actually said it only expected Planned Parenthood to be affected.)

I'll end this thread here.

My final point is that, contrary to claims that no one would have been affected by the pre-existing conditions waivers, the CBO projected that about half of America's population lives in states that would have eventually implemented those waivers.