Last March I wrote an analysis of H.R.1868, the House Democrats bill that comprises the core of the larger H.R.1884 "ACA 2.0" bill. H.R.1884 includes a suite of about a dozen provisions to protect, repair and strengthen the ACA, but the House Dems also broke the larger piece of legislation down into a dozen smaller bills as well.
Some of these "mini-ACA 2.0" bills only make minor improvements to the law, or make improvements in ways which are important but would take a few years to see obvious results. Others, however, make huge improvements and would be immediately obvious, and of those, the single most dramatic and important one is H.R.1868.
The official title is the "Health Care Affordability Act of 2019", but I just call both it and H.R.1884 (the "Protecting Pre-Existing Conditions and Making Health Care More Affordable Act of 2019") by the much simpler and more accurate moniker "ACA 2.0".
a) No complete overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system is going to happen before 2021 at the very earliest anyway; and
b) Regardless of what the hypothetical overhaul ended up looking like (M4All, Med4America, or a Public Option), it would likely take a couple of years of going through the legislative and regulatory process before actually going into effect; and that therefore...
c) In the short term (i.e., the next 2-3 years at least) what we should really be focusing on is protecting, repairing and strengthening the ACA itself, via a robust ACA 2.0 bill package.
As I reminded folks, there are two excellent ACA 2.0 bills which have already been introduced in both the House and Senate, with many overlapping provisions: In the House, it's H.R. 1884...which has also in turn been broken out into about a dozen smaller, standalone bills (several of which have already passed through the full House). In the Senate, it's S.1213, the Consumer Health Insurance Protection Act or CHIPA. As far as I know, the Senate version is a single package bill and has not been broken out into smaller chunks.
