HHS Secretary expects an August vote on Senate ACA repeal

HHS Secretary Tom Price said he believes the Senate will pass the American Heath Care Act by August, in the first indication of a timeline for the bill by the Trump administration.

Price was asked if he anticipates a vote on the bill before the Senate’s August recess on radio host Hugh Hewitt’s morning show, to which he responded “I believe so.”

The House bill’s state waiver provision would allow states to discard the essential health benefits central to the Affordable Care act—among them, coverage for preventative care. This could have a deleterious effect on screening, but policy experts believe the Senate will write their own bill instead of modifying the House legislation.

“If they start from scratch it would be very difficult to think the Senate would allow the states to waive essential health benefits,” said Cynthia Moran, Executive Vice-President Government Relations, Economics & Health Policy at the American College of Radiology.

However, whatever the Senate produces will have to keep the more conservative members of the House in mind, making the final bill unpredictable as of yet, according to Moran.

“This is going to be legislative engineering at its best,” she said. “Leaders of the Senate are going to have to come up with a policy that can pass a much more moderate policymaking body in the Senate, knowing it will ultimately have to go back to the House.”

The House bill was narrowly passed without a score from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), one point of contention among many for critics of the legislation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said the Senate wouldn’t vote on the bill until the CBO scored the bill. The CBO score of the bill will be released during the week of May 22 according to a release from the CBO.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders called the eventual score into question, saying the state waiver provisions made it impossible to predict.

“I think even if they were to score it it’s impossible to score a lot of the things that would go into this because it has so many different factors that you simply can’t predict what governors may do in their states, specific conditions that patients may have,” Sanders said in a May 4 press briefing.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are gearing up for another pitched legislative battle, hoping to have a poor CBO score in their back pocket.

“When the CBO (report) comes out on this, it’s going to be even worse,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, after the House bill was passed.