- 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.
. . .
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.
. . .
This year’s debate over trying to repeal, replace, or just rename Obamacare often recycled the well-worn nostrums concerning private health insurance arrangements. Among them:
■ A large majority of health care spending involves a much smaller, less healthy portion of the insured population, which means that the distribution of health care spending is highly concentrated.
■ Most individuals are healthy and need to spend very little on health care each year.
■ Sustainable health insurance markets require that healthy customers pay more than they want so that less healthy customers can pay less for the care they need.
■ Extensive government intervention, such as standardized benefits, generous subsidies, and limits on risk-based underwriting, is necessary in health care markets because those markets are prone to adverse selection and dangerous “death spirals.”
. . .
The changes Trump’s executive order envisions would not alter the constraints imposed by the ACA or other federal statutes. They would work within those constraints. These changes would allow many consumers to avoid the ACA exchanges and ObamaCare’s hidden taxes—but then again, so did President Obama when he created “grandmothered” plans. They would make the costs of community rating, essential health benefits, and other hidden taxes more transparent—but so did “grandmothered” plans, as well as the steps President Obama took with Congress to increase premium-assistance-tax-credit clawbacks and to limit risk-corridor subsidies.
. . .
One provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that has been delayed until 2017 is a federal mandate for standard menu items in restaurants and some other venues to contain nutrition labeling.
Drawing on nearly 300,000 respondents from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 30 large cities between 2003 and 2012, we explore the effects of menu mandates. We find that the impact of such labeling requirements on BMI, obesity, and other health-related outcomes is trivial, and, to the extent it exists, it fades out rapidly.
Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Tarren Bragdon of the Foundation for Government Accountability, and Daniel Landon of the Missouri Hospital Association joined former Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius to discuss Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
Complete footage of the debate is available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.