Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from an institutional research note written last week by Hedgeye Potomac's Chief Political Strategist JT Taylor and David Hoppe, former Chief of Staff to House Speaker Paul Ryan. To read our institutional research email sales@hedgeye.com.
Source: Mark Dixon from Pittsburgh, PA
We’ve mentioned before that health care task force Senate Republicans are now meeting several times a week. Now that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score of the House-passed bill is in, the Senate can begin in earnest to discuss more details. The CBO report was a wash and predicted only minor changes from the final changes enacted by the House.
The most difficult number for the CBO to explain is how 23 million people will lose their insurance coverage in the tenth year. As insurance companies withdraw on a weekly basis from state after state, how do people who have no one to insure them in the exchanges under Obamacare lose coverage under the new system. Sometimes using current law as your baseline makes no sense because current law doesn't reflect current reality.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hopes that the task force can put together a proposal that gets at least 50 votes as quickly as possible. The hope is that this can be done by making discrete changes in the House-passed bill.
It seems more likely that the development of the Senate legislation will more resemble "demo day” on Fixer Upper. That all means that it will take time. It will be an achievement for the Senate to get a reconciliation bill to the floor before the August recess. That would give staff the month of August to prepare the papers and then final work on a conference report could begin in September.
While the discussions are proceeding, Senate Republicans have the opportunity to reset the debate on health care. The details of health legislation are all-important, but the narrative of what Republicans want to do to create the best health care system for America has gone unaddressed because of the focus on the details of community rating, premiums, deductibles, coverage estimates, etc.
The health care debate is quite straight forward. President Obama and the Democrats put government control of people's health care on steroids in 2010. The results are clear: you can't pick your own doctor, you can't keep your plan, and you can't afford to pay the premiums and deductibles of government controlled health care.
The Republican’s aim is to create a new system based on the patient with the patient/doctor relationship at the center of the system. Better access, benefits that fit your family's needs, choices, flexible health savings accounts that let the patient decide how to use their tax free health savings accounts are the building blocks of patient centered health care.
Before it fails completely, government controlled health care must be changed to allow the patient to control their health care decisions for them and their families. This is what the discussion is all about - who controls my health care? The individual or the government.
