There's the tiniest glimmer of a possibility that maybe, just maybe, something in our federal government will actually function the way it is intended, that the Senate could do something to actually fix a problem. The odds are against it, because it's just the Senate and who knows what the utterly broken House or the deranged White House might do. But one Senate committee is going to try, with hearings scheduled to figure out how to stabilize the Affordable Care Act.
The hearings are the brainchild of Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, who has been talking for months about the need to stabilize Obamacare’s individual insurance market. What makes this effort different is that following the GOP’s failure to repeal and replace the law, Alexander now has the blessing of his party’s leadership and buy-in from the committee’s top Democrat, Senator Patty Murray of Washington State.
[…] Over the past few weeks, aides to Alexander and Murray have worked together to come up with a bipartisan witness list for back-to-back days of hearings on September 6 and 7. The first will feature testimony from state insurance commissioners (including those from Tennessee and Washington), while the next day the committee will hear from five governors representing states from different regions of the country. Aides said the committee hopes to have two more hearings on health care the following week.
Murray and Alexander hope to have legislation within weeks to take a hostage away from Trump and to give states more flexibility to adjust rules. They want to fully fund the cost-sharing reduction payments to health insurers that Trump has been threatening every month to end. Explicit, legislatively appropriated funding would take away Trump's ability to yank the funding. They are also considering revising an existing provision of the law, Section 1332, that allows states to waiver out of some of the requirement of federal health reform if they meet certain standards. It makes sense for Congress to redefine and tighten up that provision now. Many Republicans would like to do away with all of the essential health benefit requirements under the law now, and the Trump administration—given unfettered authority to grant waivers—is likely to push that envelope as much as possible. This is a chance for Democratic lawmakers to try to curtail Trump and limit the damage he can do there.
Again, even with legislation as narrow as this is going to be, if the Senate gets it through they're going to have a big job in getting Speaker Paul Ryan to recognize that he needs to work with Democrats to get it done in the House, and then to overcome Trump. They're going to need veto-proof majorities. It's not at all clear right now that there are enough Republicans who want to save their political careers from Trump to do that.