Insurers must submit applications by next Wednesday to sell plans through HealthCare.gov, and these will give us some of the first indicators of how high Obama Care costs will skyrocket in 2018. ObamaCare supporters can’t wait to blame the coming premium increases on the “uncertainty” caused by President Trump. But insurers faced the same uncertainty last year under President Obama.
Consider a recent press release from California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones. He announced that “in light of the market instability created by President Trump’s continued undermining of the Affordable Care Act,” he would authorize insurers to file two sets of proposed rates for 2018—“Trump rates” and “ACA rates.” Among other sources of uncertainty, Mr. Jones’s office cited the possibility that the Trump administration will end cost-sharing reduction payments.
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Conservatives inside and outside the Senate GOP are sounding alarms over the emerging shape of the chamber’s bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, a sign that the faction’s support may be increasingly difficult to secure.
Pressure from outside groups has intensified in recent days, and conservative lawmakers have signaled their concern that the Senate bill doesn’t do enough to curb spending on the Medicaid federal-state program for the poor or to reduce health-care premiums—two of their top goals.
“We’re not there yet,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), a leading Senate conservative, said Thursday.
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Health care has been central to U.S. political debate for nearly a decade as Democrats created a new entitlement with little public support.
Compared to that effort, the Senate this time has been a model of deliberative democracy. On Dec. 19, 2009, a Saturday, then Majority Leader Harry Reid tossed the 2,100-page bill the Senate had spent that fall debating and offered a new bill drafted in an invitation-only back room. Democrats didn’t even pretend to care what was in it while passing it in the dead of night on Dec. 24, amid a snowstorm, in the first Christmas Eve vote since 1895.
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Senate Republicans raced Tuesday to bridge divisions over rickety insurance markets and billions of dollars in insurance subsidies in their pursuit of a health-care deal.
While President Donald Trump predicted a deal would emerge, hard work remained behind the scenes.
Much of this week’s negotiations have focused on specific measures to help shore up the individual insurance market, including billions of dollars in funding to smooth the transition to a new plan if they succeed in knocking down much of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, according to Republican aides.
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California’s state Senate recently passed a single-payer health-care bill, and we’re warming to the idea as an instructive experiment in progressive government. If Democrats believe the lesson of ObamaCare is that the government should have even more control over health care, then why not show how it would work in the liberal paradise?
The legislation guarantees free government-run health care for California’s 39 million residents—no co-pays, deductibles or insurance premiums—as well as virtually unlimited benefits.
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As Congress works to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health law, Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin is already at work unwinding some of its provisions in his state.
Mr. Bevin has dismantled the state’s health-insurance exchange, moving patients to the federal website last year. He has proposed introducing new conditions for recipients of Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor, that would require patients to pay premiums of up to $15 a month and perform employment-related or community-service activities, among other provisions
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Standing in front of Air Force One in Cincinnati with two small-business owners, President Trump recounted how they “have had their lives completely upended by the disaster known as Obamacare.” One saw her choice of doctors shrink while her premiums and out-of-pocket costs soared, he said. The other has curtailed new investments in his company to maintain employees’ health benefits. The president’s comments came following a White House visit with GOP congressional leaders in which the president said he was confident Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) could “get a bill across the finish line this summer” that would overturn much of the 2010 health law and enact Republican measures in its place.
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Senate Republicans are struggling to agree on health reform, and the biggest divide concerns Medicaid. The problem is that too many seem to accept the liberal line that reform inevitably means kicking Americans off government coverage.
This narrative serves the liberal goal of scaring the public to preserve ObamaCare, but center-right and even liberal states have spent more than a decade improving a program originally meant for poor women and children and the disabled. Even as ObamaCare changed Medicaid and exploded enrollment, these reforms are working, and the House bill is designed to encourage other states to follow.
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Senate Republicans reworking Obamacare are considering taxing employer-sponsored health insurance plans, a move that would meet stiff resistance but which would help make the tax preferences for health insurance more equal. The move could raise billions in revenue that could be used to help stabilize the fragile individual insurance market. But it could be politically risky, since it could expand the impact of GOP health proposals from Medicaid recipients and those who buy insurance on their own to the roughly 177 million people who get coverage through their employers.
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Democrats in California’s state Senate spent Thursday hemming and hawing over Senate Bill 562, the Healthy California Act. The legislation would create a single-payer health care system to cover all Golden State residents. This proposal would kneecap California’s economy and saddle millions with the life-threatening wait times, rationed care, and out-of-control costs that plague all single-payer systems. The Healthy California Program would cover all medical expenses without premiums, deductibles, or copays. Such a sweeping overhaul won’t come cheap. An analysis from the state Senate Appropriations Committee puts the cost of the plan as originally proposed at around $400 billion a year.
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