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The American Health Care Act, which House Republicans unveiled Monday night with White House support, is repeal and replace, kind of. It has some suspicious similarities to Obamacare. But it marks a sharp departure in at least one crucial respect: fiscal responsibility. The bill would repeal a vast array of the Affordable Care Act’s pay-fors — taxes on upper-income people and on health-care-related entities including drugs, insurance and medical devices. To finance the spending it still envisions, the bill would replace those by cutting Medicaid and other assistance to poor and near-poor people. (3/7)

It looks as if Republicans want to bring back health care rationing. In 2010, Mark Price, a 37-year-old resident of Goodyear, Ariz., was struggling to pay the bills for his leukemia treatment. His house was under foreclosure. He had insurance through Medicaid, and yet he died after the state said it would not pay for a potentially lifesaving bone marrow transplant. Facing a $2.6 billion budget deficit, Gov. Jan Brewer and Arizona Republicans had opted to ration care, eliminating state payments for bone marrow, liver, heart, lung and other transplants. Simultaneously, the state changed eligibility rules to cut health care for 47,000 low-income children and 310,000 low-income adults. (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Aaron Glickman and Emily Gudbranson, 3/7)

Republican House leaders have spent months dodging questions about how they would replace the Affordable Care Act with a better law, and went so far as to hide the draft of their plan from other lawmakers. No wonder. The bill they released on Monday would kick millions of people off the coverage they currently have. So much for President Trump’s big campaign promise: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody” — with coverage that would be “much less expensive and much better.” (3/7)

Republicans have finally released their long-awaited alternative to the Affordable Care Act. As expected, the bill would give a huge tax cut to the wealthy and gut the federal spending that the poor and the middle class depend on for their health insurance. (Nicholas Bagley, 3/7)

The Republican alternative to the Obamacare is in, and the reviews are ... not good. “Dead on arrival,” according to Rand Paul. “Bad policy,” said the Heritage Foundation. “A train wreck waiting to happen,” according to the Cato Institute. And critics on the left were hardly any kinder. (3/8)

When he was a candidate for president, Donald Trump promised that Republicans would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with “something terrific.” Now we finally have their plan, and I am sorry to report that it’s something other than terrific. In fact, it’s so far from terrific that there doesn’t seem to be anyone other than House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) himself who thinks this bill isn’t a disaster. It’s being attacked not just from the left but from the right as well. Heritage Action and the Club for Growth, two groups that exist to browbeat Republicans into upholding hard-right principles, have just come out against it. (Paul Waldman, 3/7)

The House GOP leadership’s proposal for repealing and replacing Obamacare would actually leave much of the 2010 Affordable Care Act intact — except for the parts that make it work. Instead of fixing the problems Republicans have been complaining about, it would make them worse. And rather than making insurance affordable to more people, it would raise costs for lower-income Americans and cut them for everyone else. (3/7)

There’s a new rule in American politics: Whichever party owns healthcare will come to regret it. Seven years ago, Barack Obama’s Democrats passed a health insurance law that promised to cover almost everyone and make medical care more affordable. Best of all, Obama said, the new plan wouldn’t inconvenience anybody — except the high-income folks who got hit with a tax increase. (Doyle McManus, 3/7)

President Trump, long at the forefront of intellectual discovery, last week came up with a major finding: Health-care reform is hard. “Unbelievably complex,” in fact. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” the president said. (Dana Milbank, 3/7)

After the 1976 election, the Democratic Party seemed to enjoy a commanding position in American politics, with Jimmy Carter ensconced in the White House, a Senate supermajority and an advantage of nearly 150 seats in the House of Representatives. Yet over the next four years the Democrats achieved little of consequence, Carter passed into history as a failure, and Ronald Reagan ushered in a lasting rightward realignment. (Ron Douthat, 3/8)

After 2,500 days, the American Health Care Act is born. Congressional Republicans’ much-anticipated health-care bill may have a similar name to the Affordable Care Act it’s intended to replace, but it would have a dramatically different impact. Despite President Trump’s stated goals of covering at least as many people as the ACA, with more affordable policies, the plan put forward by the House on Monday would cut coverage for millions and make it more expensive for millions more. (Andy Slavitt, 3/7)

Concealed within the 123 pages of legislative verbiage and dense boilerplate of the House Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act are not a few hard-to-find nuggets. Here’s one crying out for exposure: The bill encourages health insurance companies to pay their top executives more. It does so by removing the ACA’s limit on corporate tax deductions for executive pay. The cost to the American taxpayer of eliminating this provision: well in excess of $70 million a year. In the reckoning of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank that analyzed the limitation in 2014, that would have been enough that year to buy dental insurance under the ACA for 262,000 Americans, or pay the silver plan deductibles for 28,000. (Michael Hiltzik, 3/7)

In other words, it's not exactly designed to pass and become a law that actually works. Speaker Paul Ryan might get the necessary 218 Republicans to close their eyes, hold hands, and jump over a cliff in order to get the bill to the Senate. It's still unlikely that the bill will pass in the Senate, where Republicans have a much slimmer majority. And that majority includes some senators who simply won't vote for significant cuts in Medicaid, since that would mean stripping health care away from people (voters!) who currently have it. Indeed, the bill is hardly certain to pass the House, where many Republicans want (among other things) much deeper Medicaid cuts. (Jonathan Bernstein, 3/7)

Republicans are playing games and using gimmicks as they struggle to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The height of this chicanery is that two House committees are drafting the legislation without analysis of the budgetary and insurance-coverage implications other than partisan claims. An undertaking on that scale would usually have access to analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But the CBO hasn't yet been able to score the hastily assembled legislation. And Republican leaders reportedly have not been encouraged by early discussions with the office, which is headed by Republican economist Keith Hall, who in the tradition of that job has a reputation for straight-shooting, detached analysis. (Albert R. Hunt, 3/7)

The American Health Care Act, introduced in the House Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees late Monday, was advertised as a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. But the real focus of the legislation is not on health-care reform, not even on repealing the ACA as such. What the AHCA would in fact do is massively redistribute wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest. (Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, 3/7)

Republicans in Congress are fond of calling Obamacare a death spiral of escalating costs and declining coverage. But their replacement plan could make those problems even worse. Tuesday, the morning after two House committees released legislation that would replace the Affordable Care Act with the American Health Care Act, the plan received a tepid, even hostile reaction from many outside conservative groups and Republicans in Congress. (Margot Sanger-Katz, 3/7)

The proposed bill manages to do about four things successfully: It cuts taxes for wealthy people, ends Medicaid as we know it to help pay for those tax cuts, reduces the number of Americans who can afford health insurance, and angers such a wide variety of voting constituencies that it is effectively dead on arrival. That's bad news for anyone hoping for a relatively quick and orderly transition from the ACA. But the dysfunction may actually be good news for hospitals and Medicaid-focused insurers. (Max Nisen, 3/7)

Less than a day after it was released, the House Republicans’ Obamacare replacement bill, the American Health Care Act, seems bereft of friends. Barely lifting a finger in opposition, Democrats may enjoy the demise of the AHCA before it leaves the House. (Jennifer Rubin, 3/7)