Representative Tom MacArthur’s amendment secured the health-care bill’s passage in the House. Now, he’s fighting to dispel misunderstandings of its intent.
As the Senate deliberates over the American Health Care Act (AHCA), attempting to develop a version of the bill that can secure the necessary 50 votes, one of the men who played an essential role in getting the bill through the House is recovering from a rough week away from Washington.
While holding town halls at home in New Jersey’s third district, Representative Tom MacArthur has faced outrage from constituents over his amendment to the AHCA, which allowed the bill to pass the House on May 4 after an initial version was scuttled in late March. Chief among their complaints is the repeated assertion that millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions will be forced off their health-care plans as a result of the bill.
MacArthur has a good read on why these claims are cropping up so frequently. “Some people say it because they don’t understand the bill,” he tells National Review in an interview. “But some people say it more cynically, because they’re trying to get political advantage out of it, and I have no use for that.”
Regardless of the motives of people opposed to the AHCA, MacArthur strongly disagrees with these claims, which he thinks do a disservice to Americans who are sincerely worried about their health-care futures. “There are many people who are scared to death right now and they’ve been thrown into fear by lies and half-truths and mischaracterizations,” he says.
In fact, MacArthur was inspired to develop his amendment because of concerns about the way the existing health-insurance market was going into a “death spiral,” harming countless Americans in the process. His 30 years working in the insurance business, along with his personal experience of the American health-care system’s problems, gave him a better understanding of the issue than most.
Though MacArthur doesn’t mention her by name in our interview, his experience with his daughter Grace, who had special needs and who died at the age of eleven as a result, informs his approach to the health-care debate. During her short life, Grace’s medical bills reached $1 million, and that experience taught MacArthur the value of good insurance, shaping his desire to be involved in reforming the health-care sector so that others in similarly difficult situations could afford coverage.
During town halls last week, MacArthur tried to demonstrate his understanding of those challenging circumstances by telling the story of his family’s decision to take Grace off life support. The crowd wasn’t interested. He was booed and shouted down by his constituents, who accused him of using his daughter as a political prop to justify taking away health care from others.
But MacArthur’s story is key to understanding why he cares so deeply about fixing health care, and it reveals the reasoning behind his last-ditch effort to save the AHCA. As he watched insurance carriers pull out of the Obamacare exchanges, leaving many states with just one or two options, he says he knew he couldn’t let the AHCA die without a fight.
“What prompted me to act was seeing what I believe is going to end in millions of people losing their insurance coverage and knowing that there are things we could do about it,” he explains. After the first version of the House bill didn’t make it to a vote, he was determined to help find a compromise.
MacArthur was inspired to develop his amendment because of concerns about the way the existing health-insurance market was going into a ‘death spiral.’
And he did. His amendment struck the difficult balance between the moderate and conservative Republican stances on health-care reform by offering states a limited waiver from essential health benefits and some community-rating rules, though not those regarding gender, age, and health status (with the exception of states that choose to institute high-risk pools for the seriously ill).
“There are two things we have to balance right now, and one of them is helping the people that are most vulnerable have coverage, and the other is making sure insurance is affordable for everyone else,” MacArthur says. That’s what his amendment was meant to achieve.
Though he agrees that the Affordable Care Act allowed millions of previously uninsured Americans to obtain health insurance, he argues that it failed in the end because it didn’t address the issue of cost and made insurance much more expensive for millions of others, including many who never used the Obamacare exchanges at all. “The only ones getting help now are the ones with the worst conditions,” he explains, “and those pools are starting to collapse because they aren’t viable insurance markets.”
This reality is something most Republicans hope to address with the creation of high-risk pools, which states are permitted to establish under the House version of the AHCA thanks to the MacArthur amendment. “We actually could do both things,” MacArthur claims: “Lower costs for most people and still take care of those that have more serious conditions.”
That’s why he is so unhappy about the beating his amendment has taken from the media and Democrats, many of whom have accused both him and the GOP of intentionally stripping away health care from Americans with pre-existing conditions who will die as a result. “The reality is the exact opposite,” he insists. “We’re taking people on the verge of losing insurance and making sure they have coverage, while still keeping health insurance affordable for Americans who don’t have serious conditions.”
“This is an attempt to fix and to help, not to hurt anybody. We’re trying to cover more people,” he says several times during our interview. While he understands why Americans would fear losing insurance coverage, he has no patience for anyone who uses that fear to manipulate people into believing lies about the Republican party’s aims. “All of the outrage is coming from people’s fear, and that fear is now turning into anger,” he says.
MacArthur is certainly willing to admit that the bill isn’t perfect — he calls it “a really good starting point” — and he’s open to working with the Senate to improve it further. But at the end of the day, he says his goal is the same as that of his party: to lower costs across the board, increase the number of health-care options in every state, and make sure that Americans with the most serious health conditions are able to receive care.
While some might disagree that the AHCA will actually achieve those ends, no one who listens to MacArthur talk about his amendment can truly believe he intends to hurt sick Americans. If his angry constituents attempted to understand his ideas rather than quickly buying into left-wing distortions of the truth, they might find they agree with their congressman more than they thought.
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