Intended for healthcare professionals

Observations Yankee Doodling

Will the Republican replacement for Obamacare become law?

BMJ 2017; 356 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j1291 (Published 13 March 2017) Cite this as: BMJ 2017;356:j1291
  1. Douglas Kamerow, senior scholar, Robert Graham Center for policy studies in primary care, professor of family medicine at Georgetown University, and associate editor, The BMJ
  1. dkamerow{at}aafp.org

Coverage: down; cost: as yet unspecified; future: uncertain

With great fanfare the Republicans have introduced and fast tracked their long awaited answer to the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). As has been well reported, the American Health Care Act would remove key provisions of the current law, such as the individual mandate (the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance), the subsidies that help poor and lower middle class people do that, and the taxes on the wealthy that support those subsidies, and from 2020 it would roll back the massive expansion of Medicaid that has covered poor people in states that accepted it.12 While making these changes, the bill maintains some Obamacare provisions that proved popular, such as the required coverage of pre-existing conditions, banned lifetime caps on …

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