Since the Affordable Care Act became law, Democrats have lost majority control of the House and Senate, while opposition to the law has been constant and implacable. Despite its unpopularity, Congressmen Sander Levin and Henry Waxman, former chairs of the two House committees that had primary jurisdiction over health care reform when the law was passed, see the ACA as an important step to moving the U.S. closer to attaining universal health care. They believe Sen. Bernie Sanders’s proposal to throw away the ACA to pursue a single-payer system is counterproductive and dangerous. Levin and Waxman support Hillary Clinton as the presidential candidate who will keep the ACA moving forward.
Last month, majorities in Congress voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Not surprisingly, President Obama vetoed the repeal bill, and the Republican Congress was unable to override the president’s veto.
As former leaders in Congress, we have a message for both sides in this debate: It’s time to give the states a chance.
This doesn’t mean that conservatives and Republicans have to give up the fight to reduce the regulations and taxes in the law. It also doesn’t mean that progressives and Democrats have to stop defending protections for the underinsured and uninsured.
Instead, it’s time to look to a provision of the Affordable Care Act — Section 1332 — that can achieve what both sides earnestly wish for: providing more Americans with access to more affordable, flexible, patient-centered health care.
Criticism of the Obama administration’s implementation of ObamaCare from the administration’s critics is not particularly surprising. There’s not much newsworthy about an administration taking fire from across the aisle. It is more notable when a prominent defender of the Obama administration acknowledges that the administration has colored outside the lines, and not always with good justification. So those interested in the Affordable Care Act and the administrative law should give Nicholas Bagley’s new paper on“Legal Limits and the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act” a careful read.
The third open-enrollment season for health plans under the Affordable Care Act moved into its final hours Sunday night with little fanfare from Obama administration officials who had been urging consumers to buy insurance.
It was unclear whether the close of the three-month enrollment window drew any stampede of last-minute shoppers on HealthCare.gov, as was the case during the first two sign-up years. In each of those, federal health officials trumpeted a late surge of people choosing health plans as evidence of Americans’ eagerness for coverage.
But on Sunday, the officials provided no figures about the final weekend’s volume of traffic on the federal insurance website.
As the third open enrollment season for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act comes to a close on Sunday, a new poll reveals that many uninsured Americans still aren’t paying attention.
The poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, released Thursday, found that the majority of the uninsured say they don’t know the deadline for getting coverage this year. Virtually no one knew that the fine for going without health insurance in 2016 has jumped to $695 per adult or 2.5% of household income — whichever is higher.
The ObamaCare “risk adjustment” program was designed to support health plans with lots of sick, expensive customers by giving them money from plans with healthier customers. The goal is to help keep insurance markets stable by sharing the “risk” of sicker people and removing any incentive for plans to avoid individuals who need more medical care. Such stability is likely to encourage competition and keep overall prices lower for consumers, while its absence can undermine both and limit coverage choices—the basic principles of the law.
Yet the way the Obama administration has carried out this strategy shows another unexpected consequence of the 2010 health care law. Critics say the risk adjustment program is having a reverse Robin Hood effect—taking money from some plans that are small, innovative or fast-growing, while handing windfalls to some of the industry’s most entrenched players.
More than 2 million existing customers with insurance under the Affordable Care Act have had coverage renewed automatically for 2016 by HealthCare.gov, after they ignored government warnings to shop around to avoid surprise spikes in prices of health plans. According to data released Tuesday, 8.2 million people already have chosen — or have been automatically assigned to — health coverage next year through the federal insurance exchange.
Mere hours before a deadline to begin or renew insurance coverage through HealthCare.gov for Jan. 1, federal officials said consumers could have extra time to buy health plans. People who want to have ObamaCare coverage on the first day of 2016 now have until 11:59 p.m. PST on Thursday to sign up on the federal insurance exchange, the marketplace’s chief executive announced Tuesday night.
The Obama administration created a “risk corridor” program to help prop up insurers who lost money in the first three years of ObamaCare where profitable insurers would pay some of those profits into a pool to help insurers who lost money. If the amount insurers lost exceeded what the companies paid in, the government would step in and make up the difference. Calling this “a taxpayer-funded bailout for insurance companies,” Rubio last year quietly inserted language into the omnibus government spending bill that barred the Department of Health and Human Services from dipping into general funds to pay failing insurers. “While the Obama administration can still administer the risk-corridor program, for one year at least, they won’t be able to use taxpayer funds to bail out insurance companies,” Rubio said.
According to findings from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans who bought the least expensive plans on the most popular tier of insurance sold on HealthCare.gov will see premium increases an average of 15% next year unless they switch to a different health plan. In nearly three-fourths of the counties where consumers can purchase insurance through the federal exchange, the plan that was the lowest-price option this year will no longer have the least expensive premium next year.