Republican lawmakers are trying to draw attention to what they say are the law’s failures. On Monday, the Ways and Means Committee said they would send out six ways the administration has violated the law over the next few days.
Committee members said the administration has said it would “use taxpayer dollars to pay off special interests” and “changed the risk corridor payment formula to provide more money to insurance companies.”
The House Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill Wednesday that would require people who improperly receive insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to repay the overpayments.
The bill, offered by Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), was approved by a vote of 22-14.
Jenkins told the committee the measure was a “simple bill,” about “good governance” and the “duty to protect the tax dollars of hardworking Americans.”
Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have asked America’s Health Insurance Plans and several major insurance companies to brief staffers by next week on reinsurance payments to insurers by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) and Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) wrote to Marilyn Tavenner, president and CEO of AHIP, as well as Aetna, Anthem, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth Group asking for briefings by March 15. The request follows an announcement made last month by CMS that it would use funds from the Department of the Treasury to make reinsurance payments to insurers, and that violates federal law, they write.
A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official said Thursday she could not say how many of the remaining 11 insurance co-ops created under the Affordable Care Act are profitable.
Eight of the 11 remaining co-ops are on corrective action plans this year that detail operational issues and ways to correct them, Mandy Cohen, CMS’s chief operating officer and chief of staff, said at a House Oversight and Government Reform Health Subcommittee hearing. She also said she could not tell lawmakers at the hearing which of the remaining co-ops are meeting their enrollment projections.
Forty-three percent of Americans expect to pay more for health care this year than they did last year, according to a survey released Tuesday from GOBankingRates.com, a personal finance and consumer banking website.
About one-fourth of respondents (23 percent) said they expect to pay “a little more than the last year,” and 20 percent said they expect to pay “a lot more than the last year.”
Tax season has alerted Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) to a new way to investigate a provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows congressional members and staffers to avoid the federal exchanges.
The Internal Revenue Services has sent 1095-C forms to congressional staffers and members in recent weeks stating that Congress is considered a large employer. That statement is at odds with a rule allowing members and their staffs to purchase insurance plans on an exchange for small business with less than 50 employees.
The Louisiana senator sent a letter to the IRS on Wednesday, asking the agency to confirm that Congress is a large employer.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) on Wednesday gave a nod of approval to a proposal about Obamacare’s Cadillac tax in the White House’s 2017 budget.
“While we will disagree more than we agree today, I do believe that there are some important areas of cooperation. I’m glad that the White House has finally faced reality in one area and agreed that the so-called Cadillac tax is not workable,” Brady said during a hearing on the proposed budget.
There is little congressional appetite to revisit ObamaCare’s Cadillac tax in an election year, but that’s not stopping the coalition opposing it from campaigning about it.
Fight the 40, the coalition that includes unions and Fortune 500 companies as members, is still pushing for a full repeal of the 40 percent excise tax on employer-sponsored health benefits above a certain threshold. The tax was originally scheduled to go into effect in 2018 but was pushed back two more years in December.
“We will continue our work to highlight how the tax creates age, gender, and geographic disparities and how it impacts vulnerable demographics,” the group said in a memo shared first with Morning Consult.
A vote to overrule President Obama’s veto of a bill that would repeal key parts of the Affordable Care Act and take away federal funding from Planned Parenthood failed to gather a two-thirds majority on the House floor today.
The House voted 241-186 to override the veto. They would have needed 285 votes to do so. The override attempt was expected to fail, but Speaker Paul Ryan said taking the vote was important to show what the GOP could do with a Republican in the White House.
Six out of 10 registered voters support “low income subsidies for health insurance.”
A smaller proportion (45%) believe states should expand Medicaid to people who work but are too poor to buy insurance.
Even fewer voters (41%) approve of President Obama’s idea to extend “start-up” benefits to states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid.