Despite advice to shop around before selecting a plan, consumers may find that getting answers about drug coverage can be an exercise in frustration, despite a federal health law requirement that insurers provide lists of the prescription medications included in their plans.
That’s because many treatments — particularly intravenous treatments like those used in cancer, hemophilia or multiple sclerosis — are covered under a separate part of an insurance plan, not the pharmacy benefit.
Two years ago, the Obama administration called the near-total, initial meltdown of the ObamaCare federal exchange a technical “glitch.” The term was widely ridiculed at the time, especially since it took weeks to fix the exchange’s website, healthcare.gov.
At Saturday night’s Democratic debate, front-runner Hillary Clinton called soaring health care costs and deductibles “glitches” resulting from the Affordable Care Act.
On December 14, former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius made news by calling the decisions of Kansas and Missouri to turn down the Medicaid expansion contained in the Affordable Care Act “morally repugnant and economically stupid.”
Heated political rhetoric does not alter the fact that a state’s decision to expand Medicaid involves complicated tradeoffs.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly today 65-33 in favor a $1.8 trillion package of spending bills and tax breaks, sending the legislation to President Obama’s desk for his signature. Included in the two bills are provisions trimming some of the levies that help finance ObamaCare. A tax on medical devices would be suspended for two years, a levy on health insurers would stop for a year and a tax on higher-cost insurance policies would be postponed two years until 2020.
It has been called into question whether it’s true that Sen. Marco Rubio is responsible for the provision (inserted into last year’s annual spending bill and now again into this year’s) that requires the risk-corridor program in ObamaCare to be budget neutral. Like this year’s giant spending law, last year’s omnibus bill was the result of a leadership-driven process that drew on substantive expertise from the relevant committee staffs but did not much involve most members of either house. But Rubio was without question the first and most significant congressional voice on this subject, and if he hadn’t done the work he did, the risk-corridor neutralization provision would not have been in last year’s (or this year’s) budget bill.
The House voted 318-109 to send a $680 billion tax-extenders bill to the Senate, which is expected to approve the legislation alongside the omnibus spending measure. The tax legislation, which would make permanent some tax credits and extend several others, is the product of a deal reached by Democratic and Republican leaders earlier this week.
“With this tax bill, families and businesses are going to have the long-term certainty that they need, instead of scrambling year after year to find out what’s next,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters on Thursday before the vote.
Consumers buying health insurance through federal and state exchanges will see their monthly premiums for the popular silver-level plans jump by an average of more than 11%, while also likely facing higher deductibles, a new analysis of exchange data by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows.
These increases will hike the cost of health insurance especially for customers who don’t receive federal subsidies to buy insurance, which may also limit the number of people insured under ObamaCare.
A federal budget proposal brought good news Wednesday for Minnesota’s medical device companies by freezing for two years a tax on products like pacemakers and ventilators that they have long opposed. The package of tax cuts and spending cued up for final votes in Congress this week would suspend the 2.3% excise tax on those devices, ultrasound machines and more that took effect in 2013 as part of the funding mechanism for President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Only 7% of the uninsured correctly identify this as the deadline to enroll in coverage and 20% say they have been contacted by someone about signing up for coverage. When asked why they have not purchased health insurance this year, nearly half of the uninsured (46%) say they have tried to get coverage but that it was too expensive.
In a big package of tax and spending legislation that Congress is likely to approve this week, Republicans have forced President Obama to swallow three changes that undermine his signature health care law, including a two-year delay of a tax on high-cost insurance plans provided by employers to workers.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Obama’s first budget director, Peter R. Orszag, a leading supporter of the Cadillac tax, said, “The two-year delay is likely to be equivalent to repeal of the tax because people will expect it to be deferred again and again.”