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WHEREAS, on Thursday, May 4, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA) by a 217-213 vote. The AHCA stands to strip millions of Americans of health insurance coverage and claw back key tenets of the Affordable Care Act (ACA); and
WHEREAS, the ACHA would allow states to obtain waivers from the ACA's requirement that insurers cover essential health benefits, such as ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health care, substance use services, behavioral health treatment, prescription drug treatment, rehabilitative and habilitative services and related devices, laboratory services, preventative wellness services, chronic disease management, and pediatric services, including vision care and oral care; and
WHEREAS, the ACHA would also permit states to opt-out of the ACA's community rating regulation, which mandated that individuals be charged the same price for health insurance irrespective of their health history or current health status, meaning that individuals with pre-existing conditions could be subjected to higher insurance costs; and
WHEREAS, the ACA's Medicaid expansion that allowed 32 states, including Pennsylvania, to grant broader access to benefits for some of those states' most at-risk residents by granting coverage to adults making up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line would be phased out after 2019 under the AHCA, and newly eligible residents would be barred from entering the program; and
WHEREAS, the AHCA would further change Medicaid by converting it to a per-capita cap system that allocates funding from the federal government to state governments for each enrollee, or allocate funding in the form of a block grant, where funding levels aren't tied to the number of enrollees. A change from the current Medicaid system, in which the government commits to paying for a Medicaid enrollee's treatment, to the per-capita cap system would be the equi...
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