This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Friday, July 14th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Senate has unveiled its revised health care bill to, in their words, repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute,

argues that despite some nods to health savings accounts and low-cost insurance

policies, it's not a step in the right direction

and would leave Republicans holding the bag for the failures of Obamacare.

Senate Republicans introduced a bill that the leadership wrote behind closed doors

that they said would repeal and replace Obamacare.

But really it would not repeal and replace Obamacare.

It would preserve and expand Obamacare in some ways.

Yes, there are cuts to the Medicaid program in the bill,

or more accurately, reductions in the rate of growth of Medicaid spending.

So there really aren't any cuts at all.

But even those reductions in the rate of growth wouldn't take effect for six years, seven years.

So there would be three Congresses

that would take their seats between now and then,

which means that those cuts, those reductions

in the rate of growth would probably never take effect.

In fact, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is reported to have told reluctant moderate Republican

senators don't worry about the Medicaid cuts because they won't ever

take effect.

So on top of that, what the bill does is it expands Obamacare's exchange subsidies to people below the federal poverty level and so it is in effect an expansion of the Medicaid program by another means.

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