Medicaid expansion is back on the ballot.
Organizers in Utah submitted signatures on Monday to put an initiative expanding Medicaid on the state’s ballot in November. They got 165,000 signatures, or about 50,000 more than they needed.
State legislators are actually pushing a limited form of Medicaid expansion, but, as we covered before, the Trump administration seems unlikely to greenlight that proposal. The ballot initiative being submitted today would be a clean version of expansion
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The Cassidy-Graham bill would repeal the ACA’s tax credits for middle-income Americans, the cost-sharing reduction subsides for low-income Americans, and the Medicaid expansion in 2020. It replaces all those programs with a market-based health care grant program, which would send states a lump sum of money to put toward health care–related purposes. Under Cassidy-Graham, this money could be spent on funding high-risk pools, sending payments to insurers to “stabilize premiums and promote State health insurance market participation, or making payments directly to health care providers, like doctors and hospitals.
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While Republicans were trying and failing to repeal Obamacare, Democrats in Congress were quietly lining up behind a single-payer health plan that, as written, would fundamentally reshape American health care for every single person in the country.
That plan has now gained the backing of 60 percent of House Democrats, the most support a single-payer plan has ever enjoyed in Congress, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is planning a national campaign for a similar proposal in early September.
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Democrats are ready to go on the health care offensive. And Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) may have a new plan for them to do it.
In an interview with Vox, Schatz revealed that he’s preparing a new bill that could grant more Americans the opportunity to enroll in Medicaid by giving states the option to offer a “buy-in” to the government program on Obamacare’s exchanges.
His proposal would expand the public health insurance program from one that covers only low-income Americans to one open to anyone seeking coverage, depending on what each state does.
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A prominent and unlikely group of liberal and conservative health experts have authored an ambitious plan to fix the Affordable Care Act — and they plan to make a hard push for their ideas on Capitol Hill. The plan is notable because it has the support of especially well-connected health advisers on both sides of the aisle.
This new plan would aim to bring more stability to the Obamacare marketplaces by securing funding for key health law subsidies and ensuring strong enforcement of the individual mandate. In a nod to conservative priorities, it would also allow states more flexibility to pursue experimental waivers and higher contributions to tax-advantaged health savings accounts.
Signatories include: Joseph Antos, Stuart Butler, Lanhee Chen, John McDonough, Ron Pollack, Sara Rosenbaum, Grace-Marie Turner, Vikki Wachino, Gail Wilensky
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The health care industry killed Hillarycare in the 1990s and cut deals to shape Obamacare more to its liking in 2009. But now, as Republicans push a sweeping and widely reviled health bill through Congress, the industry has often appeared declawed in the biggest health care fight of the decade.
It’s a deliberate strategy, interviews with nearly 20 lobbyists and other experts suggest. Health industry groups generally don’t love Obamacare enough to jeopardize their ability to shape the rest of the Republican agenda — including big corporate tax cuts. They also fear incurring White House retaliation.
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The Trump administration is apparently preparing to overhaul Obamacare’s birth control mandate, purportedly allowing any employer to seek a moral or religious exemption from the requirement, according to a draft regulation obtained by Vox. The ACA requires nearly all employers to offer health insurance that covers access to a wide array of contraceptive methods—a mandate that has faced numerous court challenges. The draft proposal, if finalized, would significantly broaden the type of companies and organizations that can request an exemption.
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Republican legislators and policy experts are kicking around a novel way to increase health coverage: automatically enrolling millions of uninsured Americans into low-cost insurance plans.
The idea has shown up on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and been discussed in private meetings of the Senate working group on health care.
“It’s a viable idea,” says Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare under President Obama and is an ardent Affordable Care Act advocate. “What’s appealing about it to Republicans and to Democrats is you want people to have free choice but not be free riders.”
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On June 21, 2017, health insurers have to decide whether they will sell coverage on the Obamacare marketplaces. “It will give us the first indication of what the ballpark rate increases are, what counties have insurers and which ones don’t,” says Robert Laszewski, an industry consultant who works with insurers that sell on the marketplace. “Insurers will have to make a statement.” The number of insurers selling on the marketplace fell significantly this year. There are 960 counties on Healthcare.gov that had just one health insurer selling coverage in 2017. That was a big increase from the 180 counties in the same situation in 2016.
The Republican Study Committee is a group that includes some of the most conservative legislators in Congress. A few years ago, it asked Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN), who co-chairs the Republican Doctors Caucus, to come up with a plan to replace Obamacare.
“I was asked to put together a plan that increased access [and] lowered costs but didn’t increase entitlements, so my hands were a bit tied,” he says.
What he came up with was this: Repeal Obamacare entirely. Get rid of the current tax preference for employer-sponsored coverage too. Regardless of where people get their health insurance, the RSC plan would give all Americans a standard deduction for health insurance — $20,500 for families and $7,500 for individuals.
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