Good evening. The House just passed Republicans’ debt limit bill. Also, Manchester City just humbled Arsenal, 4-1, to take control of the Premier League title race. We’ve got more details on one of these stories.
House Passes GOP Debt Limit Bill. Now What?
The House on Wednesday narrowly passed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s package to raise the debt limit into next year and cut trillions of dollars in federal spending. The vote was 217-215, with four Republicans joining Democrats in voting against the bill.
As close as it was, the vote represents a victory for McCarthy (R-CA) in his effort to force President Joe Biden to engage in negotiations over raising the federal borrowing limit in exchange for Republican demands. It has already led to calls from outside groups such as the Business Roundtable and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget for Democrats to come to the table, and the pressure is likely to grow as lawmakers, investors and others get increasingly jittery about the possibility of a default.
Biden insisted Wednesday that he’s not going to negotiate on the debt ceiling or reward Republican brinkmanship. “I’m happy to meet with McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended forever. That’s not negotiable,” he said.
The White House has insisted that lawmakers should raise the limit without strings attached, as they have done before, and that Republicans should not place the full faith and credit of the United States at risk. Biden has threatened to veto the GOP bill if it gets to his desk, but the legislation will be dead on arrival in the Senate, leaving the path forward unclear. The debt limit will need to be raised this year, possibly as soon as early June, to avoid a default that would rattle markets and the economy.
McCarthy agrees to late changes: The House vote came after McCarthy made a couple of major concessions in the wee hours of the morning to win over GOP holdouts who threatened to scuttle his plan. Republican leaders had insisted that they would not open the bill up, with some indicating that they had reached a “take it or leave it” stage in talks.
Ultimately, though, McCarthy agreed to some changes sought by his members. Conservatives wanted to speed the proposed implementation of stricter work requirements for low-income beneficiaries of Medicaid and food stamps, changing the timeframe from 2025 to 2024. And Midwestern Republicans wanted to avoid having tax breaks for biofuels like ethanol repealed. Those credits were enacted last year as part of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which House Republicans want to reverse.
In the end, much as he did through the 15 grueling rounds of votes it took to be named speaker, McCarthy made the concessions he needed to make to get the result he wanted.
The White House has been criticizing the GOP bill and blasted the late changes. “Speaker McCarthy has cut a deal with the most extreme MAGA elements of his party to accelerate taking food assistance from hundreds of thousands of older Americans and to carve out one industry from his draconian cuts,” White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt said in a statement, adding that the bill would still “strip away health care services for veterans, cut access to Meals on Wheels, eliminate health care coverage for millions of Americans, and ship manufacturing jobs overseas.”
What’s next: McCarthy may have demonstrated that his conference is united behind his plan, but it’s not clear that House passage of the Limit, Save, Grow Act will bring Congress and the president any closer to raising the debt limit and avoiding a potential economic catastrophe. “The GOP’s Default on America Act does not bring us any closer to avoiding the first-ever default. In fact, it only brings us dangerously close to default,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Wednesday.
The outlook is also complicated by the insistence of some House Republicans that they won’t accept anything less than the package they’ve put together. "I wanted double what was in there. I agreed to vote for it because that starts the ball and gets us in the arena to solve the debt problem,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters. “Now, I’m not interested in anything coming back, anything but what we voted for.”
The bottom line: McCarthy scored a much-needed win that solidifies his negotiating power, but it’s not clear yet that will yield any real progress toward raising the debt limit.
Work Requirements in GOP Bill Would Push 600,000 Off Medicaid: CBO
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the more stringent work requirements Republicans are proposing for Medicaid participants in the Limit, Save, Grow Act would save $109 billion over 10 years. The new rules would also result in the loss of federal Medicaid funding for 1.5 million people. Of that group, about 900,000 would likely remain in the system as states pick up the cost of their coverage, according to CBO estimates. The other 600,000 Medicaid enrollees would lose their coverage altogether and become uninsured.
As Medicaid Rules Return to Pre-Pandemic Norm, Up to 24 Million People Could Be Disenrolled: Report
As the official Covid-19 emergency comes to an end, states will start enforcing pre-pandemic standards for Medicaid participation. That means that unlike during the pandemic, when states were forbidden from removing people from the system, Medicaid beneficiaries will start losing their health insurance if they no longer qualify or fail to meet administrative requirements.
Earlier this month, analysts at KFF, a health care foundation formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, estimated that 17 million people could lose their health coverage as the old rules come back into effect. A new analysis released by KFF Wednesday, which looks at different scenarios for disenrollment, finds that the coverage losses could range from 8 million to 24 million, depending on how the process plays out in each state.
“As states resume renewals for all Medicaid enrollees, there is substantial uncertainty regarding how many people will lose Medicaid and of those, how many will transition to other coverage or become uninsured,” the report says.
The three-year period during which the usual Medicaid enrollment rules were suspended means that federal officials know less than they usually do about current enrollees. For example, some enrollees may have alternative sources of health insurance, such as through a new job, and their loss of Medicaid coverage will not result in a net loss of coverage if and when they switch to private insurance.
On the other hand, a substantial number of enrollees may be unaware of how to maintain their coverage once the new rules take effect and may lose their insurance due to paperwork issues even if they technically qualify. It is also hard to say how many people removed from Medicaid would qualify for free or very-low-cost Obamacare coverage, or how many of those who do qualify will actually sign up for it successfully.
Under the most severe scenario, 28% of all current Medicaid participants are disenrolled over the next year. In that scenario, 24.4 million people lose their Medicaid coverage. That would eliminate all growth in the program during the three years of the pandemic, which totaled 23.1 million people, and push Medicaid enrollment below the levels recorded at the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic began.
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News
- McCarthy Debt Plan Passes House, Escalating Standoff With Biden – Bloomberg
- Biden: I’ll Meet With McCarthy — But Not on Debt Limit – Politico
- Republicans Use Debt Ceiling Bill to Push Work Requirements for Millions Receiving Medicaid and Food Stamps – CNN
- Why the Senate Isn’t Jumping at the Opportunity to End the Debt Crisis – Politico
- White House Threatens Veto of Resolution to Nix Biden Truck Pollution Regulation – The Hill
- DeJoy Says USPS Will Keep Raising Prices, Follow Abortion Pill Rulings – Washington Post
- Kaiser Permanente to Acquire Geisinger – New York Times
- Biden Takes Steps to Keep Progressives Unified as he Kicks Off His Re-Election Bid – NBC News
Views and Analysis
- House Republican Debt Bill Would Throw 600,000 off Health Insurance – Jonathan Chait, New York
- Don't Count on McCarthy's Spartan Work Mandates to Save Money – Claudia Sahm, Bloomberg
- After a Hellish Start and a Honeymoon, McCarthy Faces His First Big Test – Annie Karni, New York Times
- Which Inflation Measures Matter? – Paul Krugman, New York Times
- Born to Die – Maureen Tkacik, American Prospect
- Let’s Shed Some Light on the Pharma Middlemen – Bloomberg Opinion Editors
- Medicare Payments to Hospital Outpatient Centers Are in Congress's Crosshairs – Rachel Roubein, Washington Post
- Finding the Origin of a Pandemic Is Difficult. Preventing One Shouldn’t Be. – W. Ian Lipkin, New York Times