EDITORIAL: Ill health bill

July 16--Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's third health care bill lurches even further to the right to lure some members of his caucus who thought the earlier versions were not draconian enough.

The new version continues an assault not only on the Medicaid expansion that was a key part of the Affordable Care Act, but on the broader Medicaid program. It would create a $45 billion long-term fund dedicated to opioid addiction treatment, but that is far less than the value of simply covering treatment. Likewise, it creates a $70 billion fund to cover older, sicker Medicaid enrollees, but that would expire.

Those provisions are relative to about 20 million now covered under the ACA. The new bill not only threatens aspects of that coverage, but coverage that the vast majority of Americans -- 170 million -- obtain through their jobs.

The bill would allow workers to use tax-exempt health savings accounts, which now may be used only to pay for out-of-pocket medical expenses, to pay for insurance premiums. That is a gigantic incentive for employers to terminate employment-based plans in favor of workers buying their coverage through health savings accounts.

Remarkably, something McConnell said two weeks ago, before he unveiled the new bill, defines the problem. If this bill fails, he conceded, he will have to work with Democrats on improving the ACA. That, of course, is what he should have done in the first place.

According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 66 percent of Americans oppose the new bill, up from the 61 percent who opposed its predecessor.

It's time to try a bipartisan approach, which might improve the health not only of the ACA but of Congress itself.

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