Washington, D.C.- Senate Republicans have unveiled a draft of their legislation to revamp the government’s role in the nation’s health care system, a proposal that includes reductions to Medicaid, eliminates the Obamacare mandate requiring people buy insurance and offers tax credits to help people afford insurance while slashing taxes for the wealthy.
The bill winds down the expanded Medicaid program under Obamacare after 2020 — a longer timeline than the House health care bill that was passed in May. But it also makes deeper cuts to the program in the long run by changing the federal funding allocation formula for states to receive fewer federal dollars for Medicaid recipients.
The measure also helps people who purchase insurance out of pocket, known as the individual marketplace, afford the insurance through tax credits based on income, combining the ideas behind Obamacare and the House bill. The House bill gave people tax credits based on age, severely impacting older Americans who would see premiums rise by more than 700 percent, according to analysis of the bill.
By basing tax credits on income, the Senate is aiming to ensure older Americans are not penalized. But unlike Obamacare, which gives a subsidy upfront, the Senate bill would provide a tax credit, to be received after the fact.
The details of the bill had been tightly held by Republican leaders.
Republican senators filed into a room in the U.S. Capitol Thursday morning, sat in chairs lined up in rows to listen to a presentation of a “discussion draft” of the legislation that could be voted on as early as next week.
According to Senate rules, the Senate can vote on this bill only after it is scored by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Senators expect that analysis to be done as early as Friday or perhaps Monday.
The CBO analysis of the House bill says that 23 million people would lose insurance in the next decade under their bill, which President Donald Trump called “mean” in a meeting with senators earlier this month.
Read the full bill here.
Parts of this article originally published on NBCNews.com
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