The biggest victory for taxpayers in the Obamacare fight so far was the enactment in late 2014 of language prohibiting the Risk Corridor program from being transformed into an open-ended bailout for big insurance companies. Unfortunately that language is now being sidestepped by a scheme in which the Obama administration invited the big insurance companies to sue the government, which in turn is likely to take a dive on the lawsuit and then make the bailout payments anyway. It’s outrageous and must be stopped.
At the time Congress debated the funding restriction, both the Congressional Budget Office and the White House Office of Management and Budget agreed that the provision neither spent nor saved any taxpayer money. That was because the administration maintained the program would, as Obamacare supporters had always claimed, be run in a budget-neutral fashion, paying out to insurance companies only what the program itself had already collected from other insurance companies.
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While the Affordable Care Act managed to bring basic health insurance to almost everyone in the country — about 90 percent of Americans are covered — for many people it’s not enough.
Rising deductibles and copayments can mean people don’t get much benefit from paying monthly premiums. A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows deductibles rose about eight times faster than wages in the past 10 years.
“The nature of insurance has been changing over the last decade, to the point where people’s out-of-pocket costs are becoming a real struggle,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “More people are insured, but in many ways people are not insured enough.”
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Among the most hotly debated of the issues Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have taken on in the Democratic primary contest is how best to get to universal health insurance coverage. The former secretary of state favors incremental steps, and the senator calls for a single-payer system. That debate, and their focus on universal coverage as their goal, appears to have had a modest and perhaps surprising effect on attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. The health-care law is an issue about which public attitudes seldom shift, yet the share of Democrats who want to expand the Affordable Care Act rose over the past year.
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Key findings:
With the nation’s largest health insurer exiting all but a few Affordable Care Act exchanges next year, some Americans may be left with fewer choices and some might see higher monthly premiums.
Experts say that will be the upshot of UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s recent announcement that it will pull out of most of the 34 states where it offers health plans on the public health insurance exchanges.
The public health insurance exchanges are online marketplaces where people can shop for and enroll in a health plan. This is the third year of operation for the exchanges, a key component of ObamaCare.
Meanwhile, health insurers stung by the high cost of covering public health exchange enrollees, are expected to request sharply higher rates for 2017.
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Sound fiscal policy is essential for sound governance. History shows that powerful nations that engage in reckless spending and borrowing eventually fall into periods of decline. It would be disastrous if the United States were to drift into such a slide.
What’s needed are fundamental reforms that will change the direction of key programs in ways that will last for decades. This kind of project will take many years to achieve, and some very important policy changes are likely to require lengthy transition provisions to reassure voters who are accustomed to current arrangements. But the current welfare state wasn’t built in a day, and changing its orientation is going to require persistence and patience.
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When President Obama described the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance exchanges in late 2013, he declared they would create “more choice, more competition, [and] real health-care security” for millions of Americans. This hasn’t panned out. Nearly three years later, choice and competition have declined, a problem that is already set to worsen in 2017.
UnitedHealth Group is the latest proof. On April 19, the company announced that it will abandon the exchanges in all but a “handful” of the 34 states in which it currently operates. This could leave up to 6 percent of the Affordable Care Act’s subscribers scrambling for new plans before year’s end.
With the recent announcement that UnitedHealth is withdrawing from most ACA Exchange markets – after losing $1 billion in only two years – and that the withdrawal potentially leaves almost 30% of enrollees with only one or two insurance companies to choose from, this failure may be evident sooner than we realize.
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The last thing Democrats want to contend with just a week before the 2016 presidential election is an outcry over double-digit insurance hikes as millions of Americans begin signing up for Obamacare. But that looks increasingly likely as health plans socked by Obamacare losses look to regain their financial footing by raising rates.
Just a week after the nation’s largest insurer, UnitedHealth Group, pulled out of most Obamacare exchanges because it anticipates $650 million in losses this year, Aetna’s CEO said Thursday that his company expects to break even, but legislative fixes are needed to make the marketplace sustainable.
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House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said Friday that House Republicans would unveil their ObamaCare replacement plan sometime in the next 45 days.
“The task force is working on it,” Brady said at a Bloomberg Government event. “We’ll be laying that out here over the next month and a half.”
Republicans have said that they plan to have Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) policy task forces lay out their plans before the Republican National Convention in July.
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