After midnight on the East Coast, Republicans in the Senate continued to struggle to put together a vote in favor of so-called “skinny repeal,” a bill promising light changes to Obamacare. Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner has a good breakdown:
The only thing that’s repealed are the penalties for the individual mandate (the mandate itself could not be repealed due to the restrictions imposed by the reconciliation process). Though news reports had suggested that they would also be repealing the employer mandate and the medical device tax, in reality, the tax would only be suspended for three years, and the employer mandate penalties would go to zero at first, but would come back in 2025… Taken together, as conservative health policy analyst Chris Jacobs has illustrated, the bill would keep 411 of Obamacare’s 419 sections of legislative text intact.
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