Louisiana’s health insurance market for individuals has been plagued in recent years by insurers fleeing the market and double-digit rate increases — prompting a proposed fix that would tack a fee on policies across the state to create a safety net against insurers’ losses and hold the line on runaway premiums.
The state Department of Insurance is pushing a bill through the Legislature that it says would lower premiums in the individual market by an average of 15 percent next year. The bill would put a roughly $1.25-a-month fee on every health-insured life in the state. That money, which one critic labeled a tax on business disguised as a fee, would go into what is called a reinsurance pool designed to protect insurers against high-cost patients.
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The federal health insurance exchange allows people to enroll for insurance coverage outside of the annual open enrollment period under certain circumstances, such as losing coverage from an employer. Insurers are concerned that some people are misusing this flexibility by reenrolling after their coverage was terminated for nonpayment of premiums. Not only is this against the rules, but it undermines the stability of the exchange. CMS doesn’t collect complete data that would allow it to gauge the extent of the problem. GAO recommends gathering data on coverage terminations for nonpayment of premiums.
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CBO is anticipating a 21% jump in the cost of federal subsidies this year, driven by a 34% jump in premiums for the “benchmark” plans to which those subsidies are pegged.
But after that, CBO expects a big slowdown. Federal spending on the ACA’s premium subsidies will likely grow by about 5% per year for the rest of the next decade, the budget office said. Those annual increases are mainly a result of rising health care costs.
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A couple of years ago, the health insurance exchange in Minnesota – MNsure – was in deep trouble. Health insurance premiums for individual policies had shot up by as much as 67 percent, among the steepest increases in the country. Insurers were abandoning the market, leaving 116,000 Minnesotans with scant choices.
The Minnesota Legislature offered a solution: a $271 million, publicly funded reinsurance pool that would help health insurance companies pay the most expensive medical claims, thereby lowering overall insurance premiums. The hope was that backstopping the insurers would stabilize the market and halt the rocket-like rise in premiums.
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Congress has been unable to agree on “market stabilization” for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and it was left out of the recently passed omnibus. Yet, a key discussion has been missing from the conversation, the need to rethink the single risk pool in the ACA.
Throwing money at the status quo will simply slow a market decline, which could leave millions with no access to affordable coverage. Splitting subsidized lives from nonsubsidized into two different risk pools could provide structural relief that allows markets to stabilize longer term.
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Maryland lawmakers on Wednesday finalized a bipartisan measure to collect $380 million in taxes from health insurers next year to help curtail surging premiums for 150,000 Marylanders and prevent the state’s Obamacare marketplace from a potential collapse.
The legislation was a quiet, one-year compromise between the Democratic-controlled General Assembly and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who is expected to sign the measures.
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The Trump administration said on Tuesday that 11.8 million people had signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces for 2018 — roughly 400,000 fewer than last year. Virtually the entire decrease came in the 39 states that use the marketplace run by the federal government, HealthCare.gov. In the 11 states that sell coverage for the ACA through their own marketplaces, enrollment remained the same as last year.
Everybody on Capitol Hill agreed: If anyone could break the deep-rooted partisan logjam over Obamacare in Congress, it was that deal-making duo Patty and Lamar. But in the end, it was Obamacare that broke their alliance.
Just seven months after Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) heralded the beginning of a new bipartisan era on health care following the collapse of Obamacare repeal efforts, their lofty ambitions ended in much the same way as every Obamacare-related negotiation over the last eight years — with claims of betrayal, warnings of political fallout and no progress toward bridging the deep divide over the nation’s health care system.
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Health-insurance premiums are likely to jump right before the November elections, a result of Congress’s omission of federal money to shore up insurance exchanges from its new spending package.
Lawmakers from both parties had pushed to include the funding in the $1.3 trillion spending law signed Friday, but they couldn’t agree on details. A battle has already begun over how to cast the blame for the expected rate increases.
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ObamaCare turns eight years old today. Some opponents had hoped to mark the occasion by giving supporters the birthday gift they’ve always wanted: a GOP-sponsored bailout of ObamaCare-participating private insurance companies. Fortunately, a dispute over subsidies for abortion providers killed what could have been the first of many GOP ObamaCare bailouts.
ObamaCare premiums have been skyrocketing. All indications are this will continue in 2019, with insurers announcing premium increases up to 32 percent or more just before this year’s mid-term elections. Some Republicans fear voters will punish them for the effects of a law every Republican opposed and most still want to repeal.
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