Manchin: Put health care in committee

July 28--FAIRMONT -- Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said any vote on "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act will be done with many of the senators never having seen the bill.

The "skinny repeal" would eliminate two requirements of the 2010 law, that individuals carry insurance or pay a tax and that employers offer insurance

In a conference call Thursday, Manchin said in the past week two bills have been voted down, the Better Care Reconciliation Act and a modified version of the 2015 repeal bill. A vote taken Thursday on a single-payer health-care amendment was also voted down.

Manchin alluded to the vote not having gone through the correct process and essentially being purposeless.

"This is what we get when you don't go through the committee process. So if you want to explore the single-payer, put it in the committee. ... And, (Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont.), if you're not even going to vote for the amendment that you put up, what was the purpose for putting it up?"

What would passage of the "skinny repeal" mean.

"By all accounts there will be 16 million people who will lose their insurance," Manchin stated. "But the most important thing is no one has ever seen the bill."

Although he conceded a few people may have seen it, it had not been brought before the Senate.

"I'm hoping that one fails (Thursday night)," he said of the "skinny repeal."

According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, net federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid was 5 percent of the gross domestic product.

"Mandatory outlays for health-care programs over the next decade continue to exert pressure on the federal budget overall, primarily because of the burgeoning number of Medicare beneficiaries but also because of ongoing growth in health-care spending per beneficiary in all of those programs," the report reads.

It projects net federal spending for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and subsidies for premiums and cost sharing in the health insurance marketplaces to reach 6.7 percent of GDP in 2026.

"How do we fix it? How do we keep the markets from collapsing and people paying 20 or 30 percent starting next year?" Manchin asked.

His position on a successful health-care bill was for maintaining cost-sharing revenue for up to two years in order to stabilize the market.

"We've been told the rates will be increased at least 15-20 percent just because there is an uncertainty that they're going to get the cost-sharing revenue," he explained.

"We looked at other ways we thought makes bills better: a thing called reinsurance," he said. "Which means that every state can get into the reinsurance market of taking care of those people with the highest need or chronic illnesses."

Manchin said reinsurance would take care of people with pre-existing conditions and no means of obtaining health care.

"That means that the insurance companies in the states can hopefully bid on and provide much lower premiums back to normal market-driven premiums because we have eliminated their risk on those people with chronic illness."

Aside from mandates of a bill, Manchin stressed the need to help people who have never before had insurance to use it responsibly.

Email Leah Nestor at [email protected].

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