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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“It is a have-to-get-done that’s really hard to get done,” said one lobbyist.
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It looked just like a campaign launch, from the line winding around the Fellowship Chapel Church, to the tailgaters giving away hot dogs, to the 2,000 voters who eventually packed inside.
But when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) arrived, there were no waving signs. They were there to kick off the push for universal health care, with legislation queued up for September, and no expectation that the Republican-controlled Congress would pass it.
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“Medicaid for All” has suddenly become the darling of the health reform crowd. Nevada almost became the first state in the nation to adopt Medicaid for All this year — until Gov. Brian Sandoval vetoed the plan in June. Other states, including Massachusetts and Minnesota, are looking into it.
These Medicaid-for-All plans would let anyone “buy into” the program. Middle-class families could pay government-set premiums for Medicaid coverage. They would get guaranteed health benefits at government-subsidized prices. And given that the program pays healthcare providers less than private insurance, Medicaid for All might even rein in health spending — or so the thinking goes.
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Suppose you wanted to sabotage Obamacare and could not get Congress to help. Short of repeal legislation, the next best strategy would be to cut off funds to health insurers—in other words, starve the beast. That should work, right?
Surprisingly not, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Responding to a request from House Democrats, CBO considered what could happen to health coverage, insurance premiums, and taxpayer cost if the federal government stopped paying insurers for cost-sharing reductions (CSRs). Under CBO’s scenario, the federal government would stop making payments to insurers totaling $118 billion between 2018 and 2026. As a result, the federal deficit would rise (not fall) by $194 billion, low-income individuals would pay about the same (not more) for coverage, and more people (not fewer) would be insured.
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Sen. Lamar Alexander will hold bipartisan hearings in early September in a last minute attempt to assure insurers of the federal government’s commitment to the individual market, and pave the way for states to ask for flexibility on insurance benefits.
Alexander, R-Tenn., is looking to drum up support for a “bipartisan way to get a limited result that actually helps people” after tumultuous months of heated debate over whether to repeal-and-replace the Affordable Care Act that ultimately handed the Republicans a defeat.
Alexander wants to extend cost-sharing reduction payments through 2018, and change a section of the ACA to give states more flexibility.
The timing will be difficult, he said, but necessary.
He preferred a repeal, but now wants to make sure that insurers don’t have a reason to decide last minute to pull out of the exchange
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A bipartisan Senate health panel is set to meet on Obamacare in September, but lawmakers disagree on funding for insurer payments that would otherwise lead to more exits from health insurance companies and higher premiums for people who don’t receive subsidies.
Members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are holding hearings Sept. 6-7 to discuss how to keep premiums from rising much more than they are, particularly if the payments, called cost-sharing reduction subsidies, or CSRs, are not funded. If cut off, a Congressional Budget Office analysis found, premiums would rise by an average of 20 percent next year.
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