GOP senator pitches 'Black Friday' Obamacare fix that bridges Democrat, Republican demands
FIRST ON FOX: While Senate Republicans work to coalesce behind a fix to expiring Obamacare subsidies, one Republican has a plan that he says bridges Democrats’ desires and GOP demands.Sen....
By Fox News · Fox News
FIRST ON FOX: While Senate Republicans work to coalesce behind a fix to expiring Obamacare subsidies , one Republican has a plan that he says bridges Democrats’ desires and GOP demands. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., detailed his plan, dubbed the Marshall Plan, in an interview with Fox News Digital that he pitched as a starting point that could bring both Republicans and Democrats to the table to hash out a bipartisan solution to the subsidies, and further, Obamacare as a whole. Boiled down, Marshall’s legislative package would do two things: extend the enhanced subsidies as they are for one year, and then convert those subsidies into health savings accounts (HSAs). SENATE REPUBLICANS UNVEIL PLAN TO REPLACE OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES WITH HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS That approach, in broad terms, bridges the gap between Senate Democrats’ desire to extend the subsidies and the GOP’s wishes to pivot the subsidy money into HSAs, which has the backing of President Donald Trump . "We want to turn patients into consumers again. That's the whole key here: My plan doesn't impact just the 24 million people on Obamacare. It's going to impact everybody's cost of health care," Marshall said. "So if we pair bumping up savings accounts with price tags, we're going to turn patients into consumers again, and they'll do magic things out there. I think of this being like the magic shopping weeks, Black Friday and Cyber Monday." Along with extending the enhanced subsidies and transitioning them to HSAs, Marshall’s plan would also eliminate zero-cost premiums by requiring a minimum payment of $5 per month, require people to provide a government-issued ID in a bid to eliminate fraud, and include stricter enforcement of Hyde Amendment requirements that taxpayer dollars don’t fund abortions by denying the premium credits from being used on abortion procedures. Abortion funding has proven a tricky situation in ongoing bipartisan talks, a point Marshall acknowledged but countered that he couldn’t under…