KEY VOTE: “NO” on American Health Care Act (H.R. 1628)

UPDATE (): Heritage Action will withdraw the current House key vote against the American Health Care Act (H.R. 1628) if the MacArthur-Meadows Amendment, as currently understood and drafted, is adopted.

At some point, the House is expected to vote on the American Health Care Act (H.R. 1628), which would partially repeal and replace various components of Obamacare. The proposed legislation repeals a number of Obamacare provisions and contains several notable policy reforms, but the most important part of the AHCA is what it fails to include: a repeal of the regulatory architecture of Obamacare that is responsible for the rising cost of health care.

Title I of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) lays out a number of health insurance mandates and regulations that make up the regulatory architecture of Obamacare including guaranteed issue, community rating, essential health benefits, and actuarial value, among others. While the AHCA does repeal actuarial value and partially addresses community rating by moving the age rating ratio that Obamacare imposes from 3:1 to 5:1, the bill falls far short of comprehensively addressing the overall regulatory framework of Obamacare.

Obamacare’s creators designed this regulatory framework with the intent to take control of private health insurance plans and convert them into a highly regulated, quasi-public utility. As one of the law’s supporters explained back in 2010, Obamacare’s design “transforms health insurance into a public accommodation,” and turns private health insurance into “a regulated industry . . . that, in its restructured form, will therefore take on certain characteristics of a public utility.” It strains credibility to characterize this bill as repealing Obamacare when the mechanisms for the federal government’s takeover of health care remain firmly in place.

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, explains that the AHCA is “fundamentally different” from previous Republican health care proposals, including the bill introduced by now-Secretary Tom Price, “because it functions within the core insurance rules established by Obamacare, which means it can’t really achieve most of the key aims of the conservative reforms it is modeled on.”

Lawmakers cannot preserve Obamacare’s regulatory structure and claim to have repealed the law. Without including the repeal of these regulations in the AHCA, congressional Republicans will have failed to keep their seven-year old promise to fully repeal Obamacare and health insurance costs will likely continue to increase leading up to the 2018 elections.