Â鶹ŮÓÅ

Congress may vote to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law before coming up with a replacement, GOP leaders said Tuesday. The approach could allow congressional Republicans to take swift action on one of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign promises, while putting off the hard part. And while repealing the law could be done with GOP votes alone, any replacement plan would likely require the cooperation of minority Democrats in the Senate, something that will not be easy to come by. (11/29)

Today, with Republicans poised to take control of the White House and Congress and promising to repeal Obamacare, 13.5 million Californians have Medi-Cal coverage, a 71 percent expansion since 2014 and more than a third of the state’s population... It means that California has, by far, the greatest stakes in the forthcoming battle over whether Obamacare lives or dies. And if its fate is the latter, California would have to decide whether to kick millions off the Medi-Cal rolls or cover them with state tax money.A new report from the California Budget and Policy Center, which advocates for programs serving the poor, contains a county-by-county breakdown of those stakes.It reveals, not surprisingly, that rural counties with the state’s highest levels of unemployment and poverty, have the most to lose. (Walters, 11/29)

The number of people who have trouble paying their medical bills has plummeted in the last five years as more people have gained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and gotten jobs as the economy has improved. A report from the National Center for Health Statistics released Wednesday shows that the number of people whose families are struggling to pay medical bills fell by 22 percent, or 13 million people, in the last five years. (Kodjak, 11/30)

The state’s health insurance marketplace, MNsure, announced on Tuesday, Nov. 29, that the number of Minnesotans getting financial aid for 2017 policies tripled over this year. Rural Minnesotans especially benefit from the aid, which comes from the federal government, MNsure Allison O’Toole said in a Forum News Service interview. Sixty-eight percent of greater Minnesota enrollees will receive financial aid to buy private health insurance plans, O’Toole said, compared to 53 percent in the Twin Cities. (Davis, 11/29)

As it rolls out the biggest changes to its Medicaid program in two decades, the state has enlisted six health care provider networks to start testing a new model of delivering and paying for medical care. The organizations plan to launch pilot programs on Thursday that will cover about 160,000 residents signed up for Medicaid, known here as MassHealth. (Dayal McCluskey, 11/29)