Essential Health Benefits Reviewed: ‘Galling’ Return To Bad Old Days; Lowering Premiums

Los Angeles Times: Remember When You Couldn't Get Insurance With A Preexisting Condition? Those Days Are Probably Coming Back
Raise your hand if you want to go back to the days when you couldn’t get health insurance because you’d been sick or injured. That’s one of the galling possibilities raised by the evolving version of the American Health Care Act, the House GOP leadership’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. The blame lies with the changes that President Trump and House leaders reportedly pledged to make in the bill to win the support of members of a group of far-right House members, the Freedom Caucus. (Jon Healy, 3/23)

Forbes: Bring GOP Right-Wingers And Pragmatists Together On Obamacare -- By Making Premiums Affordable
Thursday, March 23 was a wild day in Republicans’ quest to repeal and replace Obamacare, with vote cancellations, last-minute amendments, CBO analyses, and Presidential ultimatums. But the most surprising development of all was this: a way has emerged to get both hard-line and pragmatic conservatives to support the American Health Care Act. ... The GOP’s right wing came to a surprisingly pragmatic realization. While refundable tax credits were not their favored approach to health reform, there were too many Republicans who believed otherwise; stubbornness on this point would jeopardize the success of any bill to replace Obamacare. So, congressional hard-liners reoriented their efforts toward repealing most, if not all, of Obamacare’s insurance regulations. (Avik Roy, 3/24)

The New York Times: Late G.O.P. Proposal Could Mean Plans That Cover Aromatherapy But Not Chemotherapy
Why should that 60-year-old man have to pay for maternity benefits he will never use? If 60-year-old men don’t need to pay for benefits they won’t use, the price of insurance will come down, and more people will be able to afford that coverage, the thinking goes. ... But there are two main problems with stripping away minimum benefit rules. One is that the meaning of “health insurance” can start to become a little murky. The second is that, in a world in which no one has to offer maternity coverage, no insurance company wants to be the only one that offers it. (Margot Sanger-Katz, 3/23)

Huffington Post: Spicer Denies That Ending Maternity Care Guarantee Would Mean Women Pay More For Health Care He’s Wrong.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Thursday defended the idea of taking away guaranteed maternity coverage in health insurance, denying that it would mean women must pay relatively more for their health care. He’s wrong about that. Ending the guarantee could mean slightly lower premiums for individual men and much older women, but it would just as surely drive up premiums for women of child-bearing age and their families ― unless it left them paying the full cost of prenatal care and delivery, typically many thousands of dollars, out of their own pockets. (Jonathan Cohn, 3/23)

The New York Times: Yes, Senator, You Wouldn’t Want To Lose Your Mammograms — Or Women Voters
Republicans seem to have an evil genius for tone-deafness when it comes to women. On Thursday, a photograph that was widely circulated on Twitter showed a room packed with white men cutting a deal to eliminate maternity care and mammograms from the package of essential benefits that insurers are required to provide in the Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. There were some women out of camera range, including Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor. Earlier in the day, Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, made an ill-judged quip that he quickly had to apologize for: “I wouldn’t want to lose my mammograms,” he said to a reporter from Talking Points Memo. (Susan Chira, 3/23)