On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and two House committee chairmen shared with House Republicans the outlines of their plan to replace the Affordable Care Act.
The plan includes tax credits for buying insurance, which would increase with a person's age but does not change based on income, and incentives for people to open savings accounts to pay for medical expenses. The outline mentioned nothing about how any of this would be paid for, how many people would gain insurance, or how it compares to the Affordable Care Act, which extended health insurance to roughly 20 million people.
When it comes to Medicaid, the program that helps more than 70 million low-income and disabled Americans, the federal government now pays more than 90 percent of costs for newly eligible people in states that expanded Medicaid, but under the GOP plan, it would drop to 50 percent in states like California and New York. Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, told The New York Times the proposals "put a huge amount of pressure on state budgets and put many Americans at risk of losing health care coverage."
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