WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 — As the Senate prepares to vote this week on a Democratic proposal to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits so that premiums do not double, on average, for more than 20 million Americans, Republicans are advancing legislation introduced Monday by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that would eliminate those tax credits and replace them with totally inadequate checks.

In order to receive the checks proposed in the Cassidy-Crapo bill, which would total just $1,000 for younger adults and $1,500 for older adults, working families would be required to switch from gold or silver health insurance plans to bronze or catastrophic plans. The lower-quality health insurance plans that Cassidy and Crapo are encouraging come with outrageously high deductibles of $7,500 and $10,000 for individuals and up to $21,200 for households.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, today released a new report titled “More Costs, Less Care: The Republican ‘Plans’ for Health Care,” detailing how the Cassidy-Crapo bill and other Republican health care proposals would cause Americans to pay many thousands of dollars more for health care than they do today.

The report finds that if the Cassidy-Crapo bill is enacted:

• A 62-year-old couple in Miami, Florida, making $85,000 a year would be forced to pay $21,654 a year more in premiums than they do today and their deductible would go from $0 to $7,700.
• A family of four living in Kansas making $45,000 a year could be forced to pay $4,500 more for surgery after a heart attack than under current law.
• A 46-year-old living in New Orleans, Louisiana, making $32,000 a year could pay $2,560 more for breast cancer treatment and premiums than under current law.

Sanders said: “The legislation put forward by Senators Cassidy and Crapo would make an already broken and outrageously expensive health care system even worse. It would do nothing to prevent premiums from doubling, tripling or even quadrupling for millions of Americans. It would do nothing to lower the outrageous cost of health care or prescription drugs. It would do nothing to make it easier for Americans to see a doctor when they get sick. Instead, the Cassidy-Crapo bill would give some people a check of $1,000 or $1,500 if they switched to a health insurance plan with outrageously high deductibles.  How is giving someone who has cancer a check for $1,000 or $1,500 going to help them when their deductible is $7,500 or $10,000?  The Cassidy-Crapo bill would lead to more medical bankruptcies, more unaffordable care and more Americans going without the health care they desperately need. That would be absolutely unacceptable.”

Sanders continued: “This week, the Senate must extend the ACA tax credits to prevent premiums from doubling for over 20 million Americans. But that is not all we must do. We cannot remain the only major country not to guarantee health care as a human right. The function of a rational health care system must be to make people well, not to make the wealthy stockholders of big drug and insurance companies even richer.”

Read the full report here.