Meadows Shocked AHCA Would Price Those With Pre-Existing Conditions Out Of Market

This is absolutely mind-blowing. Mark Meadows, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, and driver to make the AHCA even more cruel and inhuman than its original version, apparently never realized that the plan would force millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions to get priced out of the health insurance market.

Incredibly, Meadows cheered the CBO score yesterday when it first came out. But when reporters asked about the higher premiums that people with pre-existing conditions would be charged under the state waivers of community rating and essential health benefits that Meadows himself championed, he replied, “Well, that’s not what I read”.

Which makes you wonder if he read the bill at all or even took any time to understand its implications other than the fact it would take over $1 trillion out of health care, pass the majority of those savings on to rich people and corporations with a massive tax cut, and leave only $119 billion in deficit reduction.

When he was given the passage in the CBO report concerning pre-existing conditions, he was taken aback and mentioned the possibility of revisiting the funding of the AHCA’s high risk pools. Whereupon, Meadows broke down, saying, “Listen, I lost my sister to breast cancer. I lost my dad to lung cancer. If anybody is sensitive to preexisting conditions, it’s me. I’m not going to make a political decision today that affects somebody’s sister or father because I wouldn’t do it to myself. In the end, we’ve got to make sure there’s enough funding there to handle preexisting conditions and drive down premiums. And if we can’t do those three things, then we will have failed.”

I’ll let him in on a little secret. Without the three-legged stool of requiring insurance coverage, community rating and essential benefits, and premium support, he will fail. With those, he can succeed and all it will take is a few tweaks to Obamacare.

Either Meadows is a great actor, or one of the dumbest people in Congress (and that’s a pretty high bar these days), or so caught up in the right-wing think tank and media bubble that spouts continual lies that he believes everything thing he hears. It is hard to imagine that someone with this much power and who has had eight years to study the issue could be so incredibly, seemingly willfully, ignorant of the cruelty and devastation of his proposals. It is a perfect example of how removed from reality much of the Republican House caucus has become.