My letter to the Senate Finance Committee about ACA repeal legislaton

Topher Spiro, veep for health policy at the Center for American Progress and a forceful ACA advocate on Twitter (@topherspiro), got hold of a letter from Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch to healthcare "stakeholders," inviting their input by May 23 on Republican senators' efforts to write an ACA repeal bill. Hatch asked that letters be sent to HealthReform@Finance.Senate.gov.

Since the Republican senators' bill-writing process is as secretive and rushed as the House's, Spiro seized the opportunity to encourage non-privileged "stakeholders" -- all of us -- to send their two cents to the email address provided. He has offered to tweet any letters tweeted at him, with a screenshot.

Here's mine:

Dear Members of the Senate Finance Committee:

As a constituent, husband and father of two adult children, son and son-in-law of four aged parents, member of a community and citizen of a nation with many people who lack affordable, reliable access to health insurance or are at risk of losing newly obtained insurance, I urge you

• not to eviscerate Medicaid by imposing per capita caps on federal funding or imposing a block grant formula; 
• not to phase out the ACA Medicaid expansion or reduce the enhanced federal funding that enables it;
• not to end income-based subsidies for premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses that render individual market coverage and actual healthcare affordable to millions of low-and moderate-income Americans; 
• not to compromise the ACA's ban on medical underwriting or mandating of guaranteed issue or requirement that health plans provide Essential Health Benefits; and 
• not to repeal the ACA taxes that have enabled some 20 million Americans thus far to gain insurance coverage.

Well, Ezra Klein, Republicans may not have "plan" to save insurance markets after King. But they may deal

Republican Senators Orrin Hatch Lamar Alexander John Barrasso are out today with a lightly sketched "plan" to salvage premium subsidies credited through the ACA's federal exchange if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell.  The proposal closely resembles the  possible post-King negotiation that former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt outlined to me. Here's Hatch et al:

First and most important: We would provide financial assistance to help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period. It would be unfair to allow families to lose their coverage, particularly in the middle of the year....

Second, we will give states the freedom and flexibility to create better, more competitive health insurance markets offering more options and different choices. Republicans understand that what works in Utah is different from what works in Tennessee or Wyoming. We want to give states the time and flexibility to design health-care systems that work for them, not for the bureaucrats in Washington.

People who live in states that have state exchanges will continue to be subject to Obamacare’s costly mandates and rules, along with the subsidies. But their states could also have the benefit of our solution. Every state would have the ability to create better markets suited to the needs of their citizens.

And here's Leavitt last week: