U.S. Budget - OBBB | Medicare Part D premiums set to rise

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President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” would make sweeping changes to U.S. health care, leaving millions of vulnerable Americans without health insurance and threatening the hospitals and centers that provide care to them.

The Senate on Tuesday voted 51-50 to pass the spending measure after a marathon overnight voting session on amendments. But the bill will face another major test in the House, where Republicans have a razor-thin majority and some members have already raised objections to the legislation.




Recent changes to the bill would cut roughly $1.1 trillion in health-care spending over the next decade, according to new estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

More than $1 trillion of those cuts would come from Medicaid, a joint federal and state health insurance program for disabled and low-income Americans, according to the CBO. The funding cuts go beyond insurance coverage: The loss of that funding could gut many rural hospitals that disproportionately rely on federal spending.

The CBO estimates that the current version of the bill would result in 11.8 million people losing health insurance by 2034, with the majority of those people losing Medicaid coverage.

But the implications could be even bigger. Trump’s bill combined with separate policy changes could result in an estimated 17 million people losing health insurance, said Robin Rudowitz, director of the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at health policy research organization KFF.

She said those other changes include new regulations that would dramatically limit access to Affordable Care Act Marketplace coverage and expiring enhanced ACA tax credits.




“If all of this comes to pass, it would represent the biggest roll back of health insurance coverage ever due to federal policy changes,” Cynthia Cox, KFF’s director of the program on the ACA, said in an analysis published Tuesday.
 
Senate Republicans handed a win to drugmakers after they added back a provision into the bill that would exempt more medicines from the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug price negotiations.

Under the bill, medicines used to treat multiple rare diseases will be exempt from those price talks between Medicare and manufacturers. The Senate initially left out that provision, called the ORPHAN Cures Act, in its first draft of the bill last month.

The pharmaceutical industry argues that excluding those drugs from the negotiations will encourage more investments in treatments for rare conditions. Currently, only drugs that treat a single rare disease or condition can be exempted from price talks.

“The ORPHAN Cures Act will enable more options for Americans living with rare disease,” the trade group Biotechnology Innovation Organization wrote Wednesday in a post on X. The group also said only 5% of rare diseases have an approved treatment, while the economic toll of rare conditions in the U.S. surpassed $997 billion in 2019.

But on Tuesday, drug pricing group Patients For Affordable Drugs Now called on the House to remove the ORPHAN Cures Act from the bill and allow Medicare drug price negotiations to deliver more savings to patients.

The decision to include it in the legislation “moves us in the wrong direction, undermining hard-fought progress to lower drug prices,” Merith Basey, executive director of the group, said in a statement.
 
rodoheel said:
That very well may be true, but I think super is saying basically the same thing about Collins (and you seem to be disagreeing with him).
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I have no idea about what Super did or didn't say. I said Susan Collins will not retire. And she won't. She has no reason to think she will lose in Maine. As long as that is true, she will run for another 2 terms minimum. She will either be beaten in a very close general election or she will die in office. She will not retire.
 
wmheel1287 said:
I have no idea about what Super did or didn't say. I said Susan Collins will not retire. And she won't. She has no reason to think she will lose in Maine. As long as that is true, she will run for another 2 terms minimum. She will either be beaten in a very close general election or she will die in office. She will not retire.
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She might. It all depends on her internal polling over the next six months.
 
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