Half of Virginia’s counties now are on track to have no health insurers offering Obamacare plans in 2018 after an insurer reversed a decision to sell individual health coverage in much of the state.
The pullback by Optima Health in Virginia ends a brief, two-week period in which every county in the United States was projected to have at least one Obamacare insurer next year.
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Friday said that some of the essential health benefits that had been set up under Obamacare were too limiting to customers, proposing that someone have the option to buy a plan that excludes maternity coverage while explaining his decision to mandate autism coverage in his state.
Kasich, a Republican, was appearing in a panel in Washington alongside Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with whom he has been working on an Obamacare stabilization plan to lower the costs of premiums and give customers more choices for health insurance plans.
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“While most reasonable people would welcome a bipartisan outcome to the Obamacare mess, the solutions proffered thus far would do little more than shore up the bad policies already in place with another slate of bad policies. We need legitimate, long-term reforms,” argues Sen. Hatch. “Case in point: Some are working on an approach that amounts to little more than a congressional bailout of Obamacare, including pumping tens of billions of dollars into the already failing system in the form of cost-sharing reduction payments and reenacting a temporary reinsurance program included in Obamacare that has expired.”
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Single-payer is back on the docket in California. Late last month, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announcedthat he’d formed a special committee “to develop plans for achieving universal health care in California.”
Rendon has been under pressure from progressive activists all summer, ever since he shelved SB 562, a bill passed by the state Senate on June 1 that would put all the state’s residents into a new, state-run single-payer healthcare system. At the time, he deemed it “woefully incomplete.” SB 562 did not specify how, exactly, the state would pay for single-payer.
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Donald Trump’s gleeful deal with the Democrats—ratcheting up the debt ceiling, as well as the ire of the Republican establishment—puts John Cogan’s mind on 1972. Starting in February of that year, the Democratic presidential candidates engaged in a bidding war over Social Security to gain their party’s nomination. Sen. George McGovern kicked off the political auction with a call for a 20% increase in monthly payments. Sen. Edmund Muskie followed suit, as did Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, never one to be outdone, offered a succulent 25%.
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