President Trump is sending a plan to Congress that calls for stripping more than $15 billion in previously approved spending, with the hope that it will temper conservative angst over ballooning budget deficits.
Almost half of the proposed cuts would come from two accounts within the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that White House officials said expired last year or are not expected to be drawn upon. An additional $800 million in cuts would come from money created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to test innovative payment and service delivery models.
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Here’s a simple idea to help lower health-care costs: publish prices. A bipartisan group of state lawmakers in Colorado is pushing a bill to do precisely that. The Comprehensive Health Care Billing Transparency Act would allow Coloradans to see the true price of any health service they use—exams, procedures, prescriptions—before they undertake treatment.
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President Donald Trump has found one part of the federal health law palatable: He’s allowing Obamacare rules that require chain restaurants to post calorie counts to go into effect Monday.
The rules, which are among the final pieces of the 2010 Affordable Care Act to be implemented, require restaurants to list calories on all menus and menu boards. Restaurants will also have to provide on-site additional nutritional information, such as fat and sodium levels.
The law, intended to nudge Americans to eat healthier, applies to chains with at least 20 stores.
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A coalition of policy experts from conservative think tanks and advocacy groups is quietly working to spur Congress to take another shot at overhauling Obamacare before the midterm elections.
The group, which includes former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), has members from the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Goldwater Institute who have met weekly since Republicans last gave up on trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They have met with Republican congressional aides and White House staff to discuss their ideas for turning the health law into a block grant program meant to give states far more control over health insurance regulations.
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The conservative dream of complete Obamacare repeal may be mostly dead, as Vox’s Dylan Scott suggested early this week, but as fans of The Princess Bride know, there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
The Hill reports that, in an effort to keep their repeal chances from expiring completely, conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation, the Galen Institute and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) are hoping to issue a new Obamacare replacement plan this month.
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Two of Virginia’s ObamaCare insurers are requesting significant premium hikes for 2019, according to initial filings released Friday.
Both Cigna and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield cited policies advocated by the Trump administration, including the repeal of ObamaCare’s individual mandate, as part of its justifications for the increases.
Cigna is proposing an average premium increase of 15 percent for its 103,264 customers in Virginia, with a range of increases from 6.4 percent to 40 percent.
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This fall’s midterm election ballot just got a little longer in Utah. In mid-April, progressive activists announced that they’d gathered enough signatures to force a November referendum on Medicaid expansion.
Utah isn’t the only red state flirting with extending free government health insurance to able-bodied, childless adults. Within weeks, activists in Idaho will surpass the number of signatures required for their own ballot referendum. Groups in Nebraska just launched a signature-gathering campaign, too.
If voters choose to expand Medicaid, they’ll surely regret it.
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A common argument from health care price control advocates is that there is a significant price differential for health care services between the U.S. and other developed countries, and that these differences drive higher per capita spending in the U.S. versus developed countries. While the simple answer may be “yes” to the question of whether health care services are higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries, there are other factors that need to be considered in order to fully understand why these differences exist.Several factors can influence how much a nation spends on health care, including overall utilization of services and technology, types of professionals used to deliver care, the use of biopharmaceuticals to offset more expensive health care services, and the underlying health status of the population. These and other influencers can have a direct impact on a country’s health care spending patterns.
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House lawmakers quickly voted to continue New Hampshire’s expanded Medicaid program Thursday, spending almost no time debating one of the session’s biggest policy issues.
The current program uses Medicaid funds to purchase private health plans for about 50,000 low-income residents, but it will expire this year if lawmakers don’t reauthorize it. The bill approved Thursday would continue the program for five years but change its structure to a more cost-effective managed care model. The plan also would impose new work requirements on enrollees and use 5 percent of liquor revenues to cover the state’s cost as federal funding decreases.
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- Consumers need relief from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA),
which is not working as Congress intended. Allowing short-term plans to offer 12-month
contract terms and renewal guarantees would provide protection and relief to millions of
consumers struggling with the cost of coverage under the ACA. - Guaranteed-renewable individual-market plans provide coverage for patients with highcost
medical conditions that is equally or more secure than employer-sponsored
coverage.
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