The AARP is targeting five GOP senators in an ad campaign about the American Health Care Act, even though Senate Republicans have said they’ll scrap the bill in favor of new legislation that presumably won’t tank with the American public.
The lawmakers in the lobbying group’s sights span the GOP’s ideological spectrum, from moderate Sens. Dean Heller and Lisa Murkowski to the more conservative Sens. Jeff Flake, Cory Gardner, and Dan Sullivan. Heller and Flake potentially will face challenging reelection campaigns in 2018.
The 30-second commercials highlight two of the AHCA’s changes to current law: Increasing the maximum ratio insurers can use to charge old consumers more than young ones, and allowing states to conditionally seek waivers from Obamacare’s ban on determining premiums based on health status. The ads distort both.
A minion of the cheekily named “Ryan & Associates Financial and Tax Services” tells a couple of clients within a pitching wedge of retirement, “The new health care bill in Congress: If you’re over 50, insurance companies can charge you five times more. It’s an age tax.” But the “tax” already exists at a three-to-one ratio under Obamacare. Conservative health scholars like Avik Roy have argued that expanding this “age band” would lower the cost of insurance to the young, who comprise the majority of the uninsured. Roy has estimated that the three-to-one restrictions increase the cost of coverage to the youngest insured by 75 percent, while providing pre-seniors just a 13-percent benefit.
The ad’s villain also claims an older gentleman with asthma could be charged thousands more under the House-passed health bill. That could be true at the far end of a theory. For the asthmatic consumer to suffer such a fate would require states, insurers, and his own coverage decisions to jump through more hoops than the Washington Post has Pinocchios. Read more here, here, and here.
A group of GOP senators is conducting ongoing negotiations for a health care proposal separate from what the House produced. “It’s going to be a Senate bill, so we’ll look at it,” Flake said earlier this month. Majority leader Mitch McConnell told Reuters on Wednesday that he didn’t have any news to share about the issue. As its report read, “He declined to provide any timetable for producing even a draft bill to show to rank-and-file Republican senators and gauge their support.”
The Congressional Budget Office was to release an updated score of the AHCA on Wednesday afternoon. A previous estimate did not incorporate multiple amendments that helped the legislation earn a narrow majority of House support. While the bill worked with 51 percent of the lower chamber, just 23 percent of Americans think the AHCA is a good idea, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
