{"id":248013,"date":"2017-03-10T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T20:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=248013"},"modified":"2017-03-10T06:00:10","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T20:00:10","slug":"sablan-takes-aim-new-health-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/sablan-takes-aim-new-health-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"Sablan takes aim at new health bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON, D.C.<\/strong>\u2014Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) has criticized the newly released Republican healthcare reform legislation for failing to include the U.S. insular areas. The congressman made his comments during mark up yesterday of three smaller healthcare bills in the House Education and the Workforce Committee.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had hopes that the Republican replacement would make health care more affordable, more accessible\u2014for all Americans\u2014as advertised,\u201d Sablan said. \u201cUnfortunately, the legislation is not as advertised. It does not fulfill the President\u2019s promise of \u2018insurance for everyone.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump made \u201cinsurance for everyone\u201d one of his signature pledges during last year\u2019s campaign for the White House. <\/p>\n

The Republican proposal, released on Monday, is supposed to replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The proposal provides tax credits to assist middle-income individuals purchase health insurance and per-capita funding for the Medicaid insurance program for those with lower incomes.<\/p>\n

Only persons in the U.S. states or the District of Columbia are covered, however.<\/p>\n

The U.S. insular areas were initially included in the Affordable Care Act, when the U.S. House of Representatives under Democratic control passed the measure in 2009. But the islands\u2014Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the Marianas\u2014were dropped from most of the bill in the U.S. Senate, where none of them are represented.<\/p>\n

And, later, consumer protections that Obamacare did provide the insular areas\u2014such as the ability for people with a preexisting condition to buy insurance, equal pricing for men and women, reductions in rates for older persons, and the bar on annual and lifetime limits\u2014were taken away at the request of territorial governors and insurance commissioners.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Sablan led the congressional representatives from the five insular areas\u2014Republicans and Democrats\u2014in setting out their goals for inclusion in a replacement for Obamacare. They asked to be treated as states under the Medicaid program and for people in the insular areas to be eligible for tax credits to pay for the cost of health insurance premiums. (PR)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) has criticized the newly released Republican healthcare reform…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1219,55,67,1589],"class_list":["post-248013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-affordable-care-act","tag-health-2","tag-people","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}