Pence headed to Louisville to promote health care bill
WASHINGTON — Vice President Pence will travel to the Louisville area Saturday to talk about health care and the economy with Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, according to the vice president’s office.
Details are expected to be released later Thursday.
Louisville airport officials had been told President Trump was coming, the Courier-Journal reported Wednesday.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is among the conservative lawmakers who have criticized the House GOP bill to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, saying it doesn’t do enough to dismantle the law.
Trump tweeted Wednesday: “I feel sure that my friend @RandPaul will come along with the new and great health care program because he knows Obamacare is a disaster!”
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Republicans have a slim margin in the Senate and will have a difficult time crafting health care legislation that can satisfy both conservatives and moderates. If three Republican senators oppose the bill, united Democratic opposition can stop it.
Pence has been making multiple media appearances and meeting with lawmakers to shore up support for the legislation, which is opposed by major health care groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association.
Pence tweeted out his support Thursday morning for the House Ways and Means Committee, which worked through the night to markup it’s portion of the legislation
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Bevin has said Obamacare has been a disaster in Kentucky. He’s pointed out that in about half Kentucky’s counties, only one insurance company is offering plans on the health exchanges the law created.
Democrats chose former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear — who oversaw implementation of Obamacare -— to deliver the response to President Trump’s first address to Congress last week.
“In 2010, this country made a commitment, that every American deserved health care they could afford and rely on,” Beshear said. “And we Democrats are going to do everything in our power to keep President Trump and the Republican Congress from reneging on that commitment.”
The share of Kentuckians without insurance dropped from 15.3 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2015. More than 400,000 residents gained insurance through 2015, according to the Obama administration.
Of the remaining uninsured, an estimated 45 percent are eligible for Medicaid but haven’t enrolled, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Nearly two-thirds of all federal funding Kentucky receives is for the state’s Medicaid program, which costs more than $9 billion a year.
The GOP health care bill would phase out the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, which allowed people earning up to 138 percent of poverty to enroll. The bill would also end the open-ended match states receive for all other Medicaid beneficiaries, which is about 70 percent in Kentucky. Instead, states would be given a set amount of money based on the number of enrollees they had in 2016 in various categories, including children, disabled adults and the elderly.
The bill also changes the private insurance subsidies available under the ACA for those who aren’t covered through an employer and don’t qualify for a government program like Medicare and Medicaid.
The change could help people who are younger, higher-income or live in areas where premiums are lower, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Those who are older, lower-income or live in high-premium areas such as Alaska and Arizona benefit more from the current subsidies.
