The Affordable Care Act is working to make health care more affordable, accessible, and of a higher quality for families, seniors, businesses, and taxpayers alike.
Now Congress has killed a part of Obamacare that never even got to live except in the realm of political theater.
After years of GOP bluster about a Medicare cost-cutting tool — known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB — lawmakers quietly erased that deeply controversial part of the Affordable Care Act in a broad federal spending plan that passed both chambers of Congress while we were sleeping last night. The massive budget deal, which hikes military and domestic spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, passed the House at 5:30 a.m., nearly four hours after the Senate cleared the legislation, my colleagues Mike DeBonis and Erica Werner report.
The IPAB is the second part of President Obama’s health-care law this current Congress has kicked out the door, and unlike the individual mandate — recently unwound by the partisan GOP tax overhaul — many Democrats are on board this time around, but mostly because they’re supporting the larger spending framework.
Discussion of the Affordable Care Act often incites fear, confusion, and anger in people both for and against its passage.
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