Sen. Bob Casey backs 'Medicare-like' option to keep premiums down

July 21--U.S. Sen. Bob Casey stopped in Pittsburgh on Friday to denounce a Senate Republican health care bill that could be voted on next week.

Casey, a Scranton Democrat, said he expects a vote Wednesday on the bill, which would repeal much of the Affordable Care Act and scale back Medicaid spending. The bill has floundered, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying it lacked the 50 GOP votes needed to pass, but some of the senators have been meeting to try to revive it.

"The bad bill is still with us," Casey said during a morning news conference at the Allegheny County Courthouse. "We have to stop this, this week."

He called the proposal, which includes tax cuts for the wealthy, "obscene, wrong, (and) not who we are as Americans," saying senators should send it "back to the trash heap where it belongs."

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a revised analysis Thursday saying the bill would increase the number of people without insurance by 22 million by 2026. Pennsylvania state officials have estimated the Medicaid cuts in the bill could increase the state's budget deficit by $2.4 billion by 2019.

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Lehigh County, was one of the drafters of the Republican proposal. He has said that premium increases of up to 120 percent since 2014 on individual health care plans sold on the ACA marketplace in Pennsylvania indicate the law is failing.

Casey acknowledged the problem of rising premiums Friday, saying he would support a Medicare-like public option to compete with private insurance plans and keep premiums down in regional marketplaces.

Veronika Panagiotou, 28, of Franklin Park, said at the news conference that she had been diagnosed in December 2013 with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Panagiotou didn't have insurance at the time, but was able to get a plan through the ACA's individual marketplace that covered her chemotherapy, prescription drugs, inpatient hospital stays and CT scans, she said.

Six months later she was cancer-free, she said. She is concerned her premiums would rise because of her pre-existing condition under the Republican proposal -- a common problem before the ACA's passage.

The bill, known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act, wouldn't allow insurers to deny people insurance coverage or raise their premiums specifically due to pre-existing conditions. But an amendment from Sen. Ted Cruz would allow insurers to sell plans that aren't compliant with the ACA's coverage rules, which could cause premiums for ADA-compliant plans to skyrocket, according to an analysis by Washington, D.C.-based health policy group the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Casey was scheduled to hold roundtable discussions on the potential impacts to opioid treatment in Oil City and Warren over the weekend, his spokeswoman said.

Wes Venteicher is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 412-380-5676, wventeicher@tribweb.com or via Twitter @wesventeicher.

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