Zombie ACA Repeal to Again Terrorize Populace
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Starting in 2020, the Cassidy-Graham bill would eliminate both the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies and the enhanced federal funding that underwrites the expansion of Medicaid in 31 states (plus the District of Columbia). The bill would then establish a “block grant,” handing money directly to the states for helping people to pay for health care. This would produce the best of all worlds, as Cassidy and Graham would say, because it would mean states could stop worrying about the complications of the Affordable Care Act and simply use that money in ways that will work best for them and their citizens.
In reality, the Cassidy-Graham would shrink the federal investment in health care programs dramatically, by somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 billion over the next ten years, or maybe even more, according to a preliminary and rough analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Starting in 2027, the money would vanish altogether. In theory, Congress could appropriate new money then, a possibility Cassidy and Graham have raised in an effort to soothe those nervous about such a dramatic drop-off in funds. In practice, it would take $200 billion each year just to keep pace. That’d be a huge ask for any Congress.
Will this get the votes to pass? Probably not, but it’s possible. “States’ rights” bullshit has often been an effective form of bad faith for reactionaries who want to evade the bad substance of policies they prefer. And the push for Cassidy-Graham also features the ressentiment I like to call “Mr. Plow conservatism” — in this case, “why should red states be DISCRIMINATED AGAINST because their sociopathic governors and/or legislators turn down the truckloads of money the feds are offering them to insure poor constituents?” Of course, the logic of Cassidy-Graham has a close cousin in John Roberts’s transparently illogical and unworkable holding that it’s unconstitutionally coercive for states to be required to implement Medicaid to receive Medicaid funding* (*unless you do it through the substantively identical and equally coercive method of repeal-and-replace because this holding reflects a Very Serious commitment to the Equal Sovereign Dignitude of the States and isn’t just about inflicting random damage on a statue enacted by the Democrat Party.)
Hopefully, this won’t be enough to get it over the finish line — but until October 1 this thing ain’t dead.