The Trump administration is moving ahead with Obama-era requirements to post calorie counts in restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores and pizza delivery chains nationwide next year.
Despite years of opposition by some food sellers, the Food and Drug Administration is offering only minor compromises to industry complaints about the difficulties of displaying calories at takeout chains, self-service buffets and other non-restaurant food locations.
The FDA posted a preliminary guidance online Tuesday to help businesses comply with the law.
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In an odd twist, low-income people in about half of U.S. counties will now be able to get a taxpayer-subsidized ACA policy for free. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 1,540 counties a hypothetical 40-year-old making $25,000 a year can get a basic “bronze” plan under the ACA next year for zero monthly premium. This could become a springboard for marketing pitches by insurers as they try to sign up more consumers.
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The Trump administration on Friday proposed new health insurance regulations that could affect basic benefits required by the Affordable Care Act, but not for a couple of years.
Loosening “Obamacare” benefit requirements was a major sticking point for congressional Republicans in thus-far fruitless efforts to repeal the law.
The complex new plan from the administration would give states a potential path to easing some requirements.
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President Trump is wielding his rule-making power to get closer to his goal of repealing and replacing Obamacare. His executive order issued Thursday broadly tasks the administration with developing policies to increase health care competition and choice in order to improve the quality of health care and lower prices. The order, President Trump said, would give “millions of Americans with Obamacare relief.”
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Kaiser’s tracking poll in July found 53 percent in favor of having all Americans get their health insurance from the government; 43 percent were against that. Opposition climbed to 60 percent when people were asked to consider that such a plan would call for higher taxes for many.
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On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer health care bill that would create a national health insurance program, charting a stem-to-stern reshaping of the country’s health care system. The bill would make it so that Americans would get health coverage simply by showing a new government-issued card and would no longer owe out-of-pocket expenses like deductibles. But Sanders’ description of his measure omitted specifics about how much it would cost and final decisions about how he would pay for it.
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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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The government will make this month’s payments to insurers under the Obama-era health care law that President Donald Trump still wants to repeal and replace, a White House official said Wednesday.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to end the payments, which help reduce health insurance copays and deductibles for people with modest incomes, but remain under a legal cloud.
A White House spokesman said “the August payment will be made,” insisting on anonymity to discuss the decision ahead of the official announcement. The so-called “cost-sharing” subsidies total about $7 billion this year and are considered vital to guarantee stability for consumers who buy their own individual health insurance policies.
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Republican leaders have revised their health care bill in an effort to deliver on seven years of promises to repeal and replace Obamacare. They immediately lost two pivotal votes, leaving none to spare. The reworked bill McConnell presented to fellow Republicans on Thursday aims to win conservatives’ support by letting insurers sell low-cost policies. At the same time, he seeks to placate hesitant moderates by adding billions to combat opioid abuse and help consumers with skyrocketing insurance costs. President Trump tweeted this morning, “After all of these years of suffering thru ObamaCare, Republican Senators must come through as they have promised!”
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Enough insurers are planning to sell coverage on the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges next year to keep them working — if only barely — in most parts of the country.
Competition in many markets has dwindled to one insurer — or none in some cases — and another round of steep price hikes is expected to squeeze consumers who don’t receive big income-based tax credits to help pay their bill.
“What we’re seeing is a deterioration in these markets, but the markets haven’t imploded, they haven’t gone into a rapid downward decline,” said Dan Mendelson, president of the consulting firm Avalere.
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