ACA 2.0: Progress! Chalk up more House cosponsors!

Fri, 01/31/2020 - 11:44am

As I noted a few days ago, I spent most of last week in Washington, DC attending the Families USA healthcare policy conference and meeting with staffers for a dozen or so House Democrats. My main goal in those meetings was to encourage as many House members as possible to sign on as cosponsors of what I've termed the "ACA 2.0" bills.

As a reminder, the main House ACA 2.0 bill, H.R. 1884, was also broken out into a dozen or so smaller, standalone bills. The smaller one I'm most focused on is H.R. 1868, which eliminates the ACA's 400% FPL income cap for subsidy eligibility and also beefs up the underlying subsidy formula.

Until my meetings, H.R. 1868 had 36 cosponsors including the lead sponsor, Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois...and hadn't had any new cosponsors sign on since October. H.R. 1884, meanwhile, had 160 cosponsors including the lead sponsor, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey...but hadn't had anyone sign on since last August.

I'm happy to report that each bill has had a new co-sponsor sign on within just the past couple of days!

I never met with Rep. Trone's staffer, so I can't take any credit for that one, but I did indeed meet with a healthcare policy staffer of Rep. Garcia, so score one for me!

How much does this mean? Probably not much, I admit...even if one or both of these bill does end up passing the House, it's gonna be DOA in the Senate for at least another year. And it's entirely possible that both of these House members were already planning on cosponsoring these bills at some point anyway, so it may have had nothing to do with me.

Still, progress is progress. I'll take what I can get.

So...that's 161 for H.R. 1884 now...just 57 more to go!

(H.R.1868 is only up to 37, but that's not as relevant since 1868 is included within 1884 anyway.)

ACA 2.0
HR1868
HR1884
S1213

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