Huis republicans pushed their way on Wednesday for their radical domestic policy account, completed by Marathon sign sessions that started on Tuesday and extended themselves during the night while they received about Medicaid and tax reductions.
The meetings in three important committees, a crucial part of promoting what President Trump has labeled the “one big great account” with his agenda, when Republican leaders racing to push the legislation through the house for a memorial day that starts at the end of next week.
Republicans try to expand Mr Trump 2017’s tax reduction and temporarily determine his campaign commitments to tax tips or overtime. They partly want to compensate for the approximately $ 3.8 trillion costs of those tax measures – as well as plans to increase the expenditure for military and immigration enforcement – by making cuts on Medicaid, food coupons and subsidies for clean energy.
“The American people are counting on us to get this done and get it quickly, and we are on a goal to do it,” said speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday morning at a press conference in the Capitool.
But even when they transferred the approval of the plan of the plan, the Republican leaders were made of home in their own ranks who could postpone or derail the passage. Conservative legislators have argued the proposed cuts on Medicaid, which stopped with a revision In an attempt to protect vulnerable Republicans against political recoil, do not go far enough when restructuring and reducing the costs of the program. They are unhappy that the greatest reduction included – new work requirements for beneficiaries – do not enter into force until 2029, as a result of which savings are eliminated until then, after the next presidential election.
And Republicans from high taxes such as New York were furious about a provision that would increase the limit for the state and local tax deduction to $ 30,000 from $ 10,000, a limit that they consider much too low and that was still negotiated.
Democrats, who are expected to resist the package en masse, have the majority of their criticism aimed at the healthcare institutions of the bill, which estimated more than 8 million Americans ensure that the insurance coverage loses and of which they think it will be politically harmful.
In three simultaneous meetings that start on Tuesday, House Panels moved to push through the most important elements of the vast legislation.
The Ways and Means Committee approved the tax provisions of the account, an estimated $ 3.8 trillion for a decade, just after 8 hours after a session that lasted more than 17 hours. The committee that supervises agriculture, which is considering major cutbacks on food aid programs, has chosen a different path, took a break of the debate for the evening hours and is planning to convert again later on Wednesday.
The Huis Energy and Commerce Committee, whose part of the bill includes large financing reductions and policy changes in Medicaid, plowed throughout the night. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated That the proposed changes of the committee, which have focused on health care programs, would save more than $ 900 billion in the coming decade.
Immediate debate on provisions to reform the Medicaid program started after midnight on Wednesday. By the time that the legislators started discussing these proposals, the Commission had approved parts of the bill that reduced the policy for the energy and environment of Biden era.
The overnight debate was controversial, including an extensive debate about whether the legislators can mention each other by name. A decision that names should not be used led to the partial censorship of a poster that describes a high Medicaid registration in certain Republican congress districts. (Later in the morning, the representative Frank Pallone Jr. van New Jersey, the top democrat in the committee, broke the rule. “I know I can’t say it,” he said, before he called John Joyce, Republican of Pennsylvania).).
Much of the discussion was aimed at work requirements that would impose the bill on adult medicaid beneficiaries without children, the center of the Republican proposal. The policy is expected to push millions of Americans from the program and achieve significant expenditure reductions. According to the provision, Medicaid beneficiaries should submit papers every month, which shows that they have worked or qualified for at least 80 hours for an exception.
Republicans defended the requirements and noted that they were in general Supported by the public And claim that they would create incentives for work.
“We don’t want people to participate in this program forever,” said representative Cliff Bentz, Republican of Oregon, on Wednesday morning. “And this is really a good way to get away and get a job.”
But Democrats were the provisions for complex reporting rules that they said they would lead to people who losing health coverage. Republican committee assistants were asked to answer detailed questions about what would happen if a person would not submit the required paperwork while he was admitted to the hospital for a psychiatric problem, or that someone could lose the coverage because he could not work a year ago.
Many of the details of the work requirement in the bill were modeled on a program in Georgia, which has resulted in Low registration and high administrative costs. Studies suggest that most medicaid beneficiaries who would be subject to the new rules workand earlier state experiments with work requirements nevertheless resulted in Large coverage losses.
Representative Brett Guthrie van Kentucky, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said that Republicans “had carefully made this bill to avoid the problems with which Georgia had had to deal with.
“We absolutely do not want people who are eligible for Medicaid not to receive Medicaid because of bureaucracy, especially when they try to work and be paid,” said Mr. Guthrie.
Debate was also aimed at a new co-payment requirement for when Medicaid patients go to the doctor, a change that some Democrats characterized as a “sick tax” that would prevent people with a low income from looking for care.
Discussion of the tax provisions of the bill has packed relatively faster, with the Ways and Means committee closed their work around 8:30 on Wednesday.
But at least one important element of the tax package – the state and local tax deduction – remained unsolved. Mr. Johnson has negotiated Republicans with New York to lift the limit that their party set up in 2017 on the amount of the State and local taxes that Americans can write off on their federal reports.
“This is clearly an unfinished product,” said representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top democrat in the Ways and Means Committee. “There is still a long way to go, and my feeling is that even many of the items that are included here, if this legislation comes from the committee here in the coming days, it will probably be changed considerably.”
Michael Gold And Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
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