Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Explainer: What you should know about the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA)
Explainer: What you should know about the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA)
Dec 20, 2025 5:13 AM

, their budget reconciliation proposal to repeal-and-replace the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

Here is a summary of the changes being proposed:

• Eliminates the individual mandate tax penalty (by reducing the amount owed to $0).

• Eliminates the employer mandate tax penalty (by reducing the amount owed to $0).

• Delays implementation of the so-called Cadillac tax until taxable periods beginning January 1, 2026.

• Allows all individuals purchasing health insurance in the individual market the option to purchase a lower premium catastrophic plan beginning on or after January 1, 2019.

• Repeals the language in that stipulates a medicine or drug must be a prescribed drug or insulin to be considered a qualified expense in terms of spending from a tax-advantaged health account.

• Reduce the applicable rate to 15 percent and 10 percent for health savings accounts.

• Repeals the contribution limit for health Flexible Spending Accounts, effective for plan years beginning in 2018.

• Repeals tax on prescription medications and the excise tax on medical devices.

• Repeals the health insurance tax.

• Repeals the cost-sharing subsidy program.

• Repeal of elimination of deduction for expenses allocable to Medicare Part D subsidy.

• Repeals the Chronic Care Tax.

• Repeals the tax on indoor tanning services.

• Prohibits, for one year, federal funds made available to a state through direct spending from being provided to Planned Parenthood.

• Allows Health Savings Accounts to be used to pay qualified medical expenses for account holder’s children who are under the age of 27.

• Increases the Health Savings Account annual contribution limits for self-only and family coverage to match the out-of-pocket limits for HSA-qualified HDHPs for self-only and family coverage.

• Allow both spouses to make catch-up contributions to the same health savings account.

• Disallows Health Savings Account funds to be used to pay for an high-deductible health plan that provides coverage for abortions (except if necessary to save the life of the mother or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest), beginning in 2018.

Requires any individual who was overpaid in premium tax credits to repay the entire excess amount, regardless of e, beginning in taxable year 2018.

• Changes the premium credit’s eligibility criteria to 350 percent of the federal poverty level from 100-400 percent. The bill also makes changes to the eligibility criteria applicable to certain aliens, and prohibit individuals with access to any employer-sponsored coverage from ing eligible for the credit.

• Indicates that the term “qualified health plan” does not include any health plan that includes coverage for abortions, except abortions necessary to save the life of a mother or abortions for pregnancies that are a result of rape or incest.

• Removes the small business health insurance tax credit beginning tax year 2020.

• Appropriates $15 billion for each of CY2018 and CY2019 and $10 billion for each of CY2020 and CY2021 to the Medicare and Medicaid to fund arrangements with health insurance issuers to “assist in the purchase of health benefits coverage by addressing coverage and access disruption and responding to urgent health care needs within states.

• Establishes a Better Care Reconciliation Implementation Fund within HHS to provide for administrative expenses to carry out the draft bill and appropriates $500 million to the fund.

• Establishes small business health plans.

• Appropriates to the HHS Secretary (1) $4,972,000,000 for each of FY2018 –FY2026 to provide grants to states to support substance use disorder treatment and recovery support services and (2) $50,400,000 for each of FY2018 –FY2022 “for research on addiction and pain-related to the substance abuse crisis.” Such funds would remain available until expended.

• Provide an additional $422 million for FY2017to the Community Health Center Fund.

• Establishes an age rating ratio of 5:1 for adults for plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2019. That is, a plan would not be able to charge a 64-year-old individual more than five times the premium that the plan would charge a 21-year-old individual. States would have the option to implement a ratio for adults that is different from the 5:1 ratio.

• panies offering plans in the individual market on or after January 1, 2019 would be required to impose a 6 month waiting period on individuals who had a gap in “creditable coverage” (as defined by the statute).

• Allows certain waivers for state innovations in implementing this law.

• Sets requirements for establishing federal funding for individual market plans.

Note: This summary does not include any of the revisions to Medicare or Medicaid.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
On Call and Chemicals
As part of the On Call in munity, we are interviewing people in different areas of work to showcase what being On Call in Culture looks like on a daily basis. Today we’re introducing Ed Moodie, an environmental engineer at Stepan, a global manufacturer of specialty and intermediate chemicals used in consumer products and industrial applications. It’s not often you get a good report about the environment, so when you do, it sticks with you. About 20 years ago, I...
Morlino: Religious Freedom Defended with Charity and Reason
Yesterday in his personal column for the Diocese of Madison’s Catholic Herald, Bishop Robert C. Morlino issued a call to arms to Catholics battling for their religious freedom. But such a battle, he says, is one that should emulate Christ’s loving nature, while being resolutely clear and firm in rejecting the obligation of Catholic institutions to provide healthcare that includes contraceptives and abortifacients under the Obama administration’s controversial HHS mandate(see recent reactions below on EWTN by U.S. bishops and Acton’s...
A Very Funny Conception of Liberty
The recent oral arguments presented before the Supreme Court about ObamaCare’s individual mandate have exposed a profound difference in how American’s conceive of liberty. In the the New York Times, Adam Liptak provides a revealing example: . . . Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who concluded his defense of the law at the court this week with remarks aimed squarely at Justice Kennedy. Mr. Verrilli said there was “a profound connection” between health care and liberty. “There will be...
Reply to George McGraw and Catholic World News on ‘The Right to Water’
Thanks to George McGraw, Executive Director of DigDeep Right to Water Project, for his kind and thoughtful Counterpoint to my original post. He and his organization are clearly dedicated to the noble cause of providing clean water and sanitation to all, a cause which everyone can and should support. It is also a very sensible objective that would aid the world’s poor much more than trendier causes such as “climate change” and “population control” which tend to view the human...
Video: Business as Mission 2.0
If you weren’t able to attend last week’s Acton Lecture Series event here at Acton’s Grand Rapids office, we’ve got you covered. we’re pleased to present video of Rudy Carrasco’s lecture, entitled “Business as Mission 2.0,” below. ...
Marital Status and the Social Safety Net
“Unless incentives suddenly stopped mattering during this recession, saysCasey B. Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, “it appears that the expanding social safety net explains some of the excess nonemployment among unmarried women who are heads of households.” An unintended but unavoidable consequence of providing someone a cushion when they are without work is that they are provided with less incentive to get back to work. By definition, married women have husbands and unmarried women do not,...
No ‘Impersonal’ Christian Love
From the first chapter, titled “Preparation for Lent,” of Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s Great Lent: Christian love is the “possible impossibility” to see Christ in another man, whoever he is, and whom God, in His eternal and mysterious plan, has decided to introduce into my life, be it only for a few moments, not as an occasion for a “good deed” or an exercise in philanthropy, but as the beginning of an panionship in God Himself. For, indeed, what is love...
Why Our Struggling Economy Needs More Entrepreneurship
Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser explains why entrepreneurs are important for our struggling economy: In every year since 1989, panies have created more net jobs than the economy as a whole, which means that panies are, on average, destroying more jobs than they create. In 2009, the latest year for which we have data, new businesses created 2.33 million jobs, while older businesses destroyed, on net, more than 7 million jobs. The share of Americans working in startups has fallen...
Samuel Gregg: In Praise of Business — A New ‘Note’ from Justice and Peace
On National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reviews a new document from the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace titled, “The Vocation of the Christian Business Leader.” This follows the PCJP’s controversial “note” on the global financial system issued in October. Gregg says the “Business Leader” document: Though it doesn’t shy away from making pointed criticisms of much contemporary business activity — and there is much to criticize — the Note articulates, perhaps for the first time...
The Lottery as Aspirational Insurance
Whether the lottery is, as the old adage states, a tax on people who are bad at math, it is most certainly a tax on the poor. Those who have the least spend an inordinate percentage of their e every year on lottery tickets (estimates vary from 4-9%). Yet while it is irrational for those in poverty to waste their limited resources on a one in 176 million chance, there is something almost rational in the reasoning for doing so....
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved