The ACHA Rises Again

I just came back from a meeting with our new Congressman, John Faso, and a group of actual experts in the healthcare field, including Bill Streck, who I had been working with on the impact of the ACHA on Otsego County, and Patricia Kennedy, CEO of Springbrook. It was coincidental that we met on the day that it became widely known that the ACHA had risen from the dead. Our goal was to try and summarize – in 30 minutes! - the harm that moving from the ACA to the ACHA would do to people in the region.

Faso did most of the talking, at it was at a technical level that was beyond me, and some others as well. Bill and Patricia kept up, as did Wayne Mellor, a business consultant with experience in the area. After a while, it seemed like this was a ploy, to avoid talking about wider issues, like how the changes will affect people here in Otsego County and in District 19.

He started the conversation by telling us that the ACHA would take Medicaid from being an entitlement (hasn't “being entitled” always had a negative connotation?) to – well, something else. He also said, right up front, that the reason for ACHA's changes to Medicaid was that the growth in Medicaid spending by the Federal government was “unsustainable.”

And that's where we knew that we lived, as we talked about afterwards, out on the sidewalk, in two different worlds. Congressman Faso made it clear, from the beginning, that this was about money. To us, it was about people.

I didn't get to say much (no one really did) but I did note, at the end, that my only concern was whether my constituents would have better healthcare after the ACHA was passed. The answer was not “Yes, definitely.”

An amendment to the zombie bill that would give the states wide discretion in whether folks with preexisting conditions ended up in high risk pools (which we all know don't solve any problems) and would also give states the choice of whether policies would include essential benefits, is apparently the compromise that is going to get the Freedom Caucus and the Tuesday Morning Group to support the bill. Please forgive me for being partisan, but leave it to the Congressional Republicans to finally agree on a major bill after it is made unimaginably worse.

We shall see.