TrumpCare Is Class Warfare

Some House wingers have their price for voting for what would already be one of the worst statutes ever passed by the United States Congress, and the price is making it even worse:

The “manager’s amendment” changing the legislation, which is set to be released Monday night by House leaders and expected to be adopted through a House Rules Committee vote before the full House votes on Thursday, includes new provisions cracking down on Medicaid beneficiaries. The changes would allow states to impose work requirements on able-bodied childless adults getting Medicaid, and to receive funding in a “block grant” that doesn’t rise at all with enrollment, which would likely amount to a still-larger cut.

The amendment would also eliminate federal funding for Medicaid beneficiaries making over 133 percent of the poverty line — a cut that would hurt states like New York that have generous Medicaid programs. And it would cut off states’ ability to join the Medicaid expansion immediately, before phasing out the expansion for states that joined before March 1 of this year.

The measures were reportedly adopted to win over House conservatives, like Republican Study Committee’s leader Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC), who vocally opposed the bill at first. Walker is now on board with the plan after securing the Medicaid changes. “The president asked us specifically: Would we support him on this American Health Care Act [with the increased Medicaid restrictions],” Walker told the Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis. “We all agreed, to a man.”

The original legislation was already a historic cut to aid for the poor. “No legislation enacted in recent decades cut low-income programs this much — or even comes close,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Robert Greenstein told me when the CBO’s score was released. But the two new provisions — allowing work requirements and enabling states to take a block grant — are both major changes that will diminish access to Medicaid even further. They make a bill that already represented a historic cut to the health care safety net for poor Americans even more harmful.

The fact that the fate of the ACA may well rest on members of Congress who think TrumpCare is still insufficiently cruel to the poor is not terribly reassuring.