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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