On Thursday, the American Health Care Act passed the House of Representatives -- barely.
It needed 216 votes to pass and got 217.
All 193 House Democrats opposed it, and so did 20 Republicans.
This is not a popular bill, and for good reason.
If you remember from back in March, the first version of the AHCA was terribly unpopular.
It didn't even have enough Republican support to pass the House.
So they went back to the drawing board to try to figure out how they could improve their
health care bill, and the result they came back with for version two was a much more conservative bill.
The new version of the AHCA that just passed the House had less support from moderate Republicans
and more support from super conservative Republicans.
Instead of trying to make it more of a bi-partisan compromise, they took it further to the extreme.
Because of that, the new bill is much worse than the original.
And the Congressional Budget Office hasn't even analyzed this version of the bill yet,
so we don't know what it will cost or how many people will lose health insurance because of it.
Republicans could've waited until the CBO had done their analysis, but they chose not to.
You'd think a bunch of people who tend to describe themselves as "fiscally conservative"
would want a bipartisan budget office to examine their bill beforehand so that they could fully
understand its economic impact.
But, they rushed it through before they could see that analysis, which makes you think that
they really don't care about how this bill will impact people or the economy.
They just want the credit of saving they "repealed and replaced Obamacare" as quickly as possible.
So, if the AHCA is signed into law, this is what will happen.
$880 billion dollars will be cut from Medicaid over the next 9 years.
The previous CBO analysis from the first version of the bill estimated that 14 million people
would lose their Medicaid coverage under the bill.
Given the massive cuts to Medicaid in this version of the bill, it's likely that millions
are going to lose their health insurance that way, even though Trump promised he wouldn't cut Medicaid.
Honestly, there's a contradictory Trump tweet for everything.
Under Obamacare, insurers could only charge old people three times as much as they charged young people.
Under Trumpcare, that will be changing to five times as much, meaning that premiums
for older Americans are definitely gonna go up.
Under Obamacare, tax credits were given out based on your age, income level, and the cost
of insurance in your state, but under Trumpcare, these tax credits are given out based entirely on your age.
For example, everyone under 30 gets $2,000 while everyone over 60 gets $4,000.
The Kaiser Family Foundation compared the tax credits between the two health care plans
and found that under Trumpcare, low-income people get less money, and higher-income people get more.
Is anyone surprised by that?
And speaking of helping rich people, the AHCA is actually a $600 billion tax break for wealthy
Americans because it cuts things like capital gains taxes and interest income taxes for
families making over $250,000 a year.
The bill also mandates that all insurance companies charge you 30% more if you have a gap in your coverage.
So if you lose your health insurance for some reason, don't have any insurance for a while,
and then try to go get insurance, your insurer has to charge you 30% more.
This is supposed to be an incentive for people to not leave their insurance, but it could
easily end up being an incentive for people to just never sign up for insurance.
And the AHCA will bring back annual and lifetime limits.
These limits were used by insurance companies to limit the total amount of money they would
spend on a certain person.
If the lifetime limit on your insurance plan was $1 million, and you had a chronic disease
that cost more than that over a few months or years, your insurance would just stop paying your medical bills.
This is disastrous for people who have serious chronic illnesses and rely on constant expensive treatment.
So the ACA banned those limits, but the AHCA allows individual states to bring them back.
But the worst part of the AHCA is probably the fact that it allows States to apply for
waivers to opt-out of certain things.
One of those things is mandating that all insurance plans cover 10 essential health benefits.
This was a cornerstone of the ACA because it made sure that even the most barebones
plans covered the basics that people need.
These 10 essential health benefits cover things like emergency services, maternity care, mental
health treatment, and preventative care.
However, under the AHCA, States could opt-out of those requirements
and create their own essential health benefits.
What would probably happen is that conservative states would opt-out, define their own essential
health benefits as almost nothing, and as a result, even if people could afford health
insurance, that health insurance probably wouldn't cover a lot of the care that they need.
The other thing the AHCA allows states to opt-out of is the requirement that insurance
companies don't charge people more because of their pre-existing conditions -- this is called community rating.
And protecting people with pre-existing conditions has bipartisan support because most of us
can agree that it's wrong to deny someone coverage simply because they're already sick.
Lots of sick people need health insurance to stay alive, and it's cruel to say that
people should die of preventable diseases because
insurance companies think that they would cost too much.
So, the AHCA still says that insurers can't deny someone coverage because of a pre-existing
condition, but they say that they can charge them more if they experience a lapse in coverage.
So while you may technically be able to buy insurance, if that insurance is way too expensive
for you to afford, it's basically the same as being denied coverage.
And under the AHCA, people with pre-existing conditions who don't have health insurance
for a few months at a time could find themselves priced out of any health insurance plans.
The AHCA's solution to this is creating "high-risk pools" that are basically insurance
groups for really sick people, and the bill allocates $138 billion over 10 years to the
states to fund these pools.
The problem with that is that we've tried high-risk pools, and they don't work.
The whole point of insurance is that healthy people subsidize sick people.
And in high-risk pools, there aren't many healthy people, so the costs are huge.
And experts estimate that the $138 billion isn't nearly enough to reasonably subsidize that.
Plus, the definition of a pre-existing condition is probably a lot more broad than you think.
If you got mental health treatment after having been raped, you now have a pre-existing condition.
If you had a C-section while giving birth, you now have a pre-existing condition.
If you're trans and have been to a doctor for gender dysphoria, you now have a pre-existing condition.
I'm not the only one mad about the AHCA.
The AARP spoke out against the bill, as well the American Medical Association, the American
Nurses Association, and several other large medical organizations.
This is a widely hated bill, even by health care professionals.
I know that talking about health care is boring, but this stuff has a very real effect on people's lives.
People will die if they can't get health insurance under this new law.
That's not an exaggeration; people will literally die because of this bill if it becomes law.
So we can't allow that to happen.
The next step for the AHCA is the Senate.
That means you need to be calling your Senators.
Don't let them pass this horrible bill that will cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance.
Also, if you wanna get those Republicans out of office, you can donate to the campaigns
of Democrats running against the Republicans who voted for the AHCA.
I'll leave a link to that in the description since the best way to send a message to our
legislators is to vote them out of office.
And that's all I had for you today.
Thanks for watching this episode of Politics with Riley.
I'll see you next time.
For more infomation >> A.D.N - TRAILER (sous-titres français) - Duration: 1:13. 
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