By Robert Menendez

Earlier this year, congressional Republicans abandoned their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the face of the overwhelming opposition from their constituents. After that failure, they could have worked with Democrats on a bipartisan bill to improve the law.

Instead, they've doubled-down on their plan to take coverage away from 24 million Americans and give insurance companies permission to discriminate against patients with pre-existing conditions.

House Republicans are calling this revised legislation a "compromise" - but the only thing it compromises are hard-won protections for consumers and families.

Throughout 2016, President Trump was keenly aware that the American people wanted to improve - not dismantle - the Affordable Care Act. That's why he wisely promised to preserve the law's protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. After his victory in November, the President, on 60 Minutes, even called it "one of the strongest assets" of Obamacare.

Indeed, before these protections, health insurance companies regularly cited "pre-existing conditions" as an excuse to deny claims, hike premiums, or drop patients from their coverage altogether. No one was safe - whether the customer was a cancer survivor, a worker with arthritis, or a child with asthma, health insurers regularly sent families into bankruptcy.

Consumers understand how health insurance is supposed to work. You pay premiums every month so that if you get sick or hurt, you're protected from financial ruin. What Republicans aim to do with this bill is allow health insurance companies to charge you more just because you need to use the coverage you've been paying for all along. And that's in addition to the deductibles, co-pays, and other out-of-pocket costs you pay to get care.

Yet, the damage doesn't stop at higher costs. This legislation still eviscerates Medicaid. It still cuts taxes for health insurance industry executives. It still defunds Planned Parenthood. And to appeal to the most far-right ideologues in Congress, it takes unpopular ideas -- like the age tax -- and makes them worse. While their first bill allowed insurers to charge older Americans up to five times more than younger customers, today's version proposes removing all limits on how high insurance companies can hike older Americans' premiums - starting next year.

It also opens doors for insurance companies to start selling junk policies that don't cover essential benefits like hospital stays, prescription drugs, maternity care, and mental illness and substance abuse treatment.

We already know what happens when we don't require insurance companies to cover these basic benefits: they don't provide them. We already know what happens when we don't forbid them from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions: they go ahead and do it. We know these things because they are a return to the broken system we had before the Affordable Care Act - one in which consumers were covered only so long as they never needed any coverage.

This bill is a rotten deal for consumers and for patients. It's more than an attack on attack on women, or middle-aged workers, or over half a million New Jerseyans covered by Medicaid expansion. It's an attack on any living person who runs the risk of getting sick or hurt at some point in their lives. In other words: it's an attack on all of us.

Earlier this year, President Trump said that health care is complicated. As a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, I have to agree. Passing health care reform wasn't easy. In 2009, our committee held 53 meetings before passing the bill. Then, we spent nearly a month considering the legislation on the Senate floor.

In the end, many of the provisions I fought for were scrapped - including a public option for consumers and a nationwide, as opposed to state-based, insurance marketplace. But that didn't stop me from voting to pass it because I knew what was at stake.

There are many ways we could make the Affordable Care Act stronger. That's why it's time Republicans put this partisan process aside and focus on solving problems in our health care system - not bringing old ones back from the past.

Robert Menendez, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator for New Jersey.

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.