Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday to summon Congress into a special session to end and replace the Affordable Care Act, as he portrayed the repeal of the contentious health-care law as a prime reason for voters to elect him.
In midday remarks in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump went slightly beyond his previous promise to try to end the ACA, widely known as Obamacare, on the first day of a Trump administration. But his call for a special session puzzled many, as the current Congress is scheduled to reconvene after the election, and the new one will gavel in January, before Inauguration Day.
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Donald Trump turned from attacking Hillary Clinton over her emails to focusing on voters’ pocketbook issues Tuesday, denouncing President Barack Obama’s health-care law and the recent rise in individual insurance premiums.
The Republican presidential nominee renewed his call to repeal and replace the law known as Obamacare on the first day of the official sign-up period for coverage under the law, and in the wake of significant rate increases in many battleground states.
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Anthem Inc. said it may join other major U.S. health insurers in largely pulling out of Obamacare’s markets in 2018 if its financial results under the program don’t improve next year.
Anthem retreating from the Affordable Care Act would mean that almost all of the major American for-profit health insurers have substantially pulled back from the law. The other big insurers — UnitedHealth Group Inc., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. — have already scaled back, after posting massive losses. The retreats threaten to further destabilize coverage in the markets for individual coverage, known as exchanges, that provide insurance to millions of Americans.
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House Democrats argue in an amicus brief filed Monday that a lawsuit brought by House Republicans against the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act should not have standing in court.
Led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 11 top Democrats filed the brief arguing the dispute should not be settled in court, but that even if the case has standing, the Obama administration acted lawfully by reimbursing insurers for cost-sharing reductions under the Affordable Care Act.
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When Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces launched in fall 2013, Arizona seemed like a success. Eight insurers competed to sign up consumers, offering a wide variety of plans and some of the lowest premiums in the country.
Today, with ACA enrollment starting Nov. 1, Arizonans will find in most counties only one insurer selling exchange plans for 2017. Premiums for some plans will be more than double this year, some of the biggest increases in the nation. Only last-minute maneuvering prevented one Arizona county from becoming the first in the nation to have no exchange insurers at all.
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As open enrollment starts Tuesday on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, consumers in some parts of the country are bracing for huge rate hikes, while many others are preparing to change insurers and likely doctors.
The crazy quilt of 2017 changes is creating angst among both supporters of the law and consumers under 65 who don’t get their insurance through work. And it comes as enrollment needs a big boost, especially of younger, healthier people to help offset insurers’ costs of covering the sicker people who have signed up so far.
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The cost of health insurance in the Obamacare exchanges is set to rise significantly in 2017. Here in Missouri, premiums are rising by over twenty points on average. But for the Show-Me State, that average rate increase only tells part of the story.
For one, the high cost of Obamacare-approved insurance plans isn’t hitting customers uniformly across the state; indeed, rural customers are far more likely to be charged more for health insurance than their urban peers, even within an “Affordable Care Act” marketplace.
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The 25 percent increase in Obamacare premiums for 2017 announced on October 24 is eye-popping. That is five times the increase that workers are likely to see in the cost of health benefits offered by employers. Politically, this is a disaster.
However, the jump in premiums is overdue. Insurers in the exchange market have found that the cost of providing coverage is much higher than they initially projected. We expect insurers to offer coverage to everyone, regardless of their health condition. That’s good social policy, but it is expensive.
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One of the most popular pieces of ObamaCare could be hurting the administration’s push to attract more young people into the wobbly marketplace, according to several people who helped shape the law.
The administration is staging campus enrollment drives and pouring money into Facebook and Instagram ads this year in an attempt to boost ObamaCare enrollment among young adults. The sign-up period begins Tuesday.
Yet there’s a fundamental flaw in the effort — and it has to do with ObamaCare’s design.
Because of the healthcare law, the White House says nearly 3 million young people under the age of 26 have been able to stay on their parents’ insurance plans and don’t have to shop for coverage on HealthCare.gov.
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In July analyst Paul Westra of the brokerage firm Stifel Nicolaus warned of a looming “restaurant recession,” noting that it might be the first sign of a more widespread U.S. recession in 2017. He said this in a bearish report that downgraded 11 restaurant stocks.
The facts on the ground support his gloomy forecast. Restaurant traffic has declined 2.8% from the start of the year through September, according to the Restaurant Industry Snapshot, a survey of some 25,000 restaurants by research firm TDn2K. At this pace, the firm said, “2016 would be the weakest annual performance since 2009, when the industry was recovering from the recession.”
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