A group of 11 states and the District of Columbia running their own Obamacare exchanges want more federal funding to stabilize exchanges facing higher premiums and insurer defections.
The states wrote to leaders of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with their ideas on Tuesday. Those include guaranteeing insurer payments and establishing a permanent reinsurance fund to help insurers.
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Congressional Democrats may be tempted to think they shouldn’t negotiate with Republicans on health care because, so far, the GOP has shown itself incapable of fulfilling its commitment to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “Why rescue Republicans from their failure?” the thinking goes.
This is a short-sighted perspective. Yes, the GOP effort has stalled, but, absent some kind of bipartisan deal which brings more stability and consensus to health policy, it is still possible that Republicans will succeed in pushing substantial changes on their own, despite strong opposition from Democrats.
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Residents in every U.S. county are expected to have at least one insurer to buy coverage from on Obamacare’s exchange when open enrollment starts in November, but several difficult decisions lie ahead for customers, particularly those who will not receive any help paying for their premiums.
Those customers are facing significantly higher costs for their policies, and those whose current insurer isn’t providing coverage for 2018, whether subsidized or not, likely will have to change doctors and hospitals to make sure they aren’t slammed with high out-of-pocket medical expenses.
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While Republicans were trying and failing to repeal Obamacare, Democrats in Congress were quietly lining up behind a single-payer health plan that, as written, would fundamentally reshape American health care for every single person in the country.
That plan has now gained the backing of 60 percent of House Democrats, the most support a single-payer plan has ever enjoyed in Congress, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is planning a national campaign for a similar proposal in early September.
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Govs. John Kasich of Ohio (R) and John Hickenlooper of Colorado (D) announced Monday that they have reached an agreement on a bipartisan proposal to stabilize ObamaCare markets.
The governors, who have been calling for bipartisanship on healthcare in a series of recent interviews, are not yet releasing the details of their stabilization plan.
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While Republicans fret over how many taxpayer-funded patches they will have to stick on ObamaCare to keep it on life-support, Democrats are already moving on to their real goal: a government-run, single-payer healthcare system.
Moderate Republicans like Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) are hoping to find bipartisan support for legislation that will save the individual (i.e., non-group) health insurance market and keep the ObamaCare exchanges from collapsing.
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A majority of voters back the idea of tying Medicaid eligibility to employment status as the Trump administration weighs whether to give more states the power to impose work requirements on the government health program.
In an Aug. 10-14 Morning Consult/POLITICO poll, 1,997 registered voters were asked whether they generally support requiring individuals to have a job in order to be eligible for the program. Fifty-one percent of voters said they support that proposal, while 37 percent said they oppose it. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
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The government says about 500,000 fewer Americans had no health insurance the first three months of this year, but that slight dip was not statistically significant from the same period in 2016.
Progress reducing the number of uninsured appears to have stalled in the last couple of years, and a separate private survey that measured through the first half of 2017 even registered an uptick.
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“It is a have-to-get-done that’s really hard to get done,” said one lobbyist.
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It looked just like a campaign launch, from the line winding around the Fellowship Chapel Church, to the tailgaters giving away hot dogs, to the 2,000 voters who eventually packed inside.
But when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) arrived, there were no waving signs. They were there to kick off the push for universal health care, with legislation queued up for September, and no expectation that the Republican-controlled Congress would pass it.
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