The Obama administration is promising to crack down on healthcare customers who buy coverage in between enrollment periods to lower costs. Andy Slavitt, acting head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, acknowledged publicly for the first time Monday night that some customers are using loopholes in the enrollment sign-up periods to avoid paying healthcare premiums year-round.
He said more details about the administration’s plans will come next week, after the Jan. 31 deadline for coverage.
Kentucky’s new Republican governor, Matt Bevin, has notified the Obama administration that he plans to dismantle the state’s ObamaCare marketplace. Bevin, who was sworn in last month, promised to scrap the marketplace, called Kynect, as part of his campaign, but he is now making it official. Bevin’s office said in a statement to WFPL News in Kentucky that having the state run the marketplace is a “redundancy.”
The Senate voted overwhelmingly today 65-33 in favor a $1.8 trillion package of spending bills and tax breaks, sending the legislation to President Obama’s desk for his signature. Included in the two bills are provisions trimming some of the levies that help finance ObamaCare. A tax on medical devices would be suspended for two years, a levy on health insurers would stop for a year and a tax on higher-cost insurance policies would be postponed two years until 2020.
Health insurers nabbed a victory in the $1 trillion spending bill unveiled late Tuesday night, earning a one-year freeze on the so-called premium tax. The tax has been strongly opposed by insurance companies and business groups, who argue that the cost of the tax is passed on to workers in the form of higher premiums.
ObamaCare is expected to cost the U.S. workforce a total of 2 million jobs worth of hours over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday. The total workforce will shrink by just under 1% as a result of the new coverage expansions, mandates and changes in tax rates, according to the report.
The CEO of UnitedHealth, the nation’s largest health insurer, said on Tuesday he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses. “It was for us a bad decision,” CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business. UnitedHealth announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out of the exchanges completely in 2016.
Longtime opponents of the ObamaCare “Cadillac tax” met with lawmakers this week with a new message: We’re willing to compromise. In a fly-in visit with key members and committee staff, employer benefits lobbyists went in seeking a more politically viable solution than full repeal. Rather than eliminating the tax entirely, they pitched exempting the contributions that are made to employers’ health savings accounts, which could otherwise be subject to the 40 percent excise tax.
Longtime opponents of the ObamaCare “Cadillac tax” met with lawmakers this week with a new message: We’re willing to compromise. In a fly-in visit with key members and committee staff, employer benefits lobbyists went in seeking a more politically viable solution than full repeal. Rather than eliminating the tax entirely, they pitched exempting the contributions that are made to employers’ health savings accounts, which could otherwise be subject to the 40 percent excise tax.
The Obama administration on Sunday begins what is expected to be the toughest enrollment period yet for ObamaCare. The administration has sought to lower expectations, trimming back its overall enrollment projection while warning that the people who remain uninsured will be the hardest to reach.
Three states are firing the latest volley in the court battles over ObamaCare with a new lawsuit filed Thursday over the law’s fee on health insurers.
Texas, joined by Kansas and Louisiana, is suing the Obama administration over the alleged “unconstitutional Obamacare tax.”