Donald Trump’s inconsistencies on health policy are baffling experts and deepening the doubts that conservatives have about his candidacy.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has put forward a healthcare plan on his campaign website that leaves out many of the bolder promises he has made during debates and speeches.
Trump has repeatedly promised to “take care of everybody,” but his health plan includes no major expansion of coverage; one analysis asserted the proposal would actually end coverage for 21 million people.
Similarly, he has vowed to keep protections for people with pre-existing conditions, but his plan includes no such provision.
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The Senate will begin work thisweek on its health-related appropriations bill, which it hopes will make it to a floor vote this year.
The health panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee, led by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), will meet Tuesday to mark up its spending bill. That bill, which includes funding for the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, passed out of committee last year, but ultimately did not make it for a full floor vote.
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The IRS raised concerns in early 2014 about the legality of certain ObamaCare payments that Republicans are now challenging in a lawsuit, according to a deposition from a former agency official.
David Fisher, who was the IRS’s chief risk officer, told the House Ways and Means Committee that agency officials questioned whether the Affordable Care Act provided the authority to make certain payments to insurers without an appropriation from Congress.
Most senior IRS officials ended up concluding that the payments were legal after a meeting with the White House to hear its legal justification, and the administration eventually went ahead with disbursing the funds.
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House Republicans and the Obama administration are clashing over subpoenas for ObamaCare documents. Republicans are upping the pressure on the administration, saying officials are withholding documents that Congress has every right to see.
At issue are two separate portions of ObamaCare. One is the Basic Health Program, which states can choose to implement and is aimed at providing choices for low-income people with slightly too much income to qualify for Medicaid. The other is the law’s “cost-sharing reductions” which are payments that help lower out-of pocket-costs for low-income ObamaCare enrollees.
“Your refusal to provide the requested documents and information raises serious concerns about the Department’s willingness to be accountable for the lawful execution of laws passed by Congress,” Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton and House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell on Tuesday.
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House Republicans say that the Obama administration is ignoring subpoenas for documents related to ObamaCare spending they call illegal.
“Your refusal to provide the requested documents and information raises serious concerns about the Department’s willingness to be accountable for the lawful execution of laws passed by Congress,” Upton and Brady write to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
ObamaCare premium increases will be higher than last year, according to a new analysis of early data.
The analysis from the consulting firm Avalere Health finds that proposed ObamaCare premiums for silver-level plans are increasing an average of 16 percent in nine states that so far have complete data.The proposed increases for silver plans, the most popular, vary widely, from a 44 percent average increase in Vermont to a 5 percent increase in Washington state.
The increases appear to be higher than last year on average. An Avalere analysis at a similar point in the process last year found an average increase of about 6 percent.
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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) says the proposals of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders would add $19 trillion to the debt — an increase from its previous estimate.
In an analysis published in April, the CRFB estimated that the Independent senator’s proposals would add $2 trillion to $15 trillion to the debt, depending on the cost of Sanders’s single-payer healthcare plan. Since then, two new independent analyses have found that the healthcare plan “would cost dramatically more than the campaign-provided estimates suggest,” the CRFB said Thursday in its updated analysis.
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The legal war over ObamaCare is back.
A federal judge gave House Republicans a significant victory on Thursday when she ruled that the administration is illegally making certain ObamaCare payments without a congressional appropriation.
Still, the case is far from over. Democrats are turning their attention to the appeal of the ruling, and experts say the case does not pose the same mortal threat to the healthcare law that previous challenges did.
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The leaders of the House GOP effort to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will brief lawmakers at a closed-door meeting Thursday before publicly releasing their plan in June.
The meeting, which will be attended by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), marks the first time the task force will lay out a draft of its plan after months of conversations with members, according to a House GOP aide.
The plan is expected to include numerous standard Republican health policy ideas — including a controversial proposal to cap the employer tax exclusion for health insurance, according to two Republican lobbyists.
Democrats have long attacked Republicans for failing to come up with an alternative healthcare plan, but leaders, including Ryan, have promised to produce one that could be taken up by a GOP president next year.
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The Obama administration on Friday announced changes to ObamaCare sign-up rules that are intended to cut down on people gaming the system and address a complaint from insurance companies that they say is causing them to lose money.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it is tightening the rules for enrolling in one of ObamaCare’s extra sign-up periods.