Illustration by Matt Chase

On Thursday, Senate Republicans unveiled their bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

The Senate bill is really three separate proposals. In the private-insurance market, it amounts to what Larry Levitt, a health-care expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, calls “Obamacare-lite.” As for Medicaid—the federal program that provides health services to roughly seventy-five million Americans, most of whom are poor or elderly or are children—the bill involves much bigger, and more harmful, changes. Finally, the legislation would deliver a hefty tax cut to some of the wealthiest households in the country.

In the individual market, the bill offers somewhat more generous subsidies for people buying individual plans on government-run exchanges than the ones in the House G.O.P.’s American Health Care Act. Because the subsidies would be tied to income and the actual cost of insurance rather than age, they would be substantially bigger for old people, who face much higher premiums. This would alleviate one of the House […]