How The Senate GOP Health Care Bill Could Affect The Midterms And Beyond
One provision of the Senate's health care bill stands to be quite popular: the Better Care Reconciliation Act would eliminate the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. That would be repealed immediately.
Another would likely please the Republican base: defunding Planned Parenthood for a year. Those funds would disappear right away, too.
Another would threaten health care coverage for millions of Americans: a rollback to the Medicaid expansion. That change wouldn't start until 2021.
Repealing Obamacare may be Senate Republicans' main goal, but it's also easy to see how the BCRA could benefit the GOP in coming elections. The provisions that stand to be more popular (and less harmful to many Americans) are front-loaded, occurring before the 2018 midterms. Cuts to premium subsidies and Medicaid come after that, and many of them are delayed until after the 2020 presidential election.
To better see how this bill could affect future politics, we've
