Tracking changes to the American Health Care Act (AHCA)
Last week the House Republican leadership unveiled a draft proposal to, as they call it, “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). As with all legislation in Congress, drafts are often amended on their way to becoming law — the AHCA is no different.
As the draft works its way through the budget reconciliation process, committees are proposing and, in some cases, adopting changes to the original draft.
Update: In addition to the changes below posted from March 24, House Republicans published a new set of changes on March 20.
Subsidies for short-term limited duration insurance
During the night of March 10, the House Ways and Means committee adopted an amendment that “would prohibit short-term limited duration insurance from being eligible coverage” for subsidies toward covering the cost of the plan. Here’s the amendment as proposed:
The amendment was adopted by voice vote.
After the House Republican leadership updated the AHCA draft PDF at readthebill.gop, we red-lined the PDF to see what changes were posted compared to the PDF posted early lats week. Indeed the amendment’s changes appear on page 92 of the new draft:
Changes to the Patient and State Stability Fund
In the House Energy and Commerce Committee, an amendment by the chair modified the AHCA’s Patient and State Stability Fund. The new fund would provide $35 billion over ten years to states to further subsidize premiums or encourage insurance carriers to participate in state markets. The amendment clarified how much would be spent:
The section 2204(a) it mentions is a table of how much to spend on the fund each year. And we see this change in our red-line:
Other minor changes
There are other technical changes in the new draft.
A new Section 2711 was renamed to Section 2710A (on page 64):
And some citations were corrected, like here on page 26:
42 USC 1320a-7a is about “Civil monetary penalties” while 42 USC 1320a-7 is about “Exclusion of certain individuals and entities from participation in Medicare and State health care programs.” It looks like a lawyer made a simple mistake of leaving out an “a” in the original. The intended meaning was clear in the original — this doesn’t change the meaning, it just makes it easier to follow.
