Republicans Secure Health Law Coverage Change
The change involves improving coverage choices for small business. In the meantime, Senate Democratic leadership is trying to secure victories for their at-risk colleagues and Republicans look to pass a budget.
The Associated Press: GOP Seeks Coverage Choices In Health Law They Hate
House Republicans quietly secured a recent change in President Barack Obama's health law to expand coverage choices, a striking, one-of-a-kind departure from dozens of high-decibel attempts to repeal or dismember it. Democrats describe the change involving small-business coverage options as a straightforward improvement of the type they are eager to make ... No member of the House GOP leadership has publicly hailed the fix, which was tucked, at Republicans' request, into legislation preventing a cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients (Espo, 4/6).
The Washington Post’s The Fact Checker: McConnell’s Stale, Inflated Claim About Health Plan Cancellations
We have explained before that, depending on the phrasing, this can be a misleading comparison. But the gap in the numbers in McConnell’s op-ed jumped out at The Fact Checker, especially because Kentucky is a rare example of a red state building an exchange that, by most accounts, has operated smoothly. What’s behind these numbers? (Kessler, 4/7).
Politico: Senate Leaders Give Floor Time To Vulnerable Dems
At-risk senators will get to beef up their back-home cred by taking the lead on bills and amendments tailored to their campaigns. And they won’t be stuck in the back row at news conferences but will be in front of TV cameras and taking center stage during Senate debates. It’s all part of an effort to blunt a furious Republican midterm campaign centered on attacking President Barack Obama and Democrats in the Senate who supported his signature health care law (Everett and Goode, 4/6).
Bloomberg: Obamacare Can Be Repealed Even With Enrollment, Ryan Says
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said Congress and a new president could still repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care law after 2016, rejecting Democratic arguments that the measure is irreversible. “I don’t think it can last,” Ryan said of the law in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg Television to air on “Political Capital with Al Hunt” this weekend (Wallbank, 4/5).
Politico: GOP Confident About Paul Ryan’s Budget
For a time last week, Ryan’s budget encountered problems as conservatives threatened to oppose the proposal to express frustration about a controversial parliamentary maneuver GOP leadership deployed to pass the “doc fix.” Though it seems that leadership has minimized the opposition, Republicans privately concede that they’ll most likely pass the 2015 budget by the slimmest margin in their four years in power (Bresnahan and Sherman, 4/6).