Republicans and Democrats are engaging in warfare over a traditionally bipartisan program to insure children.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is marking up legislation to extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program by five years. However, Democrats have objected to the legislation because of measures to pay for the program.
“Here we are with a partisan bill that asks us to pay for coverage of children on the backs of seniors and the most vulnerable among us,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Friday said that some of the essential health benefits that had been set up under Obamacare were too limiting to customers, proposing that someone have the option to buy a plan that excludes maternity coverage while explaining his decision to mandate autism coverage in his state.
Kasich, a Republican, was appearing in a panel in Washington alongside Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with whom he has been working on an Obamacare stabilization plan to lower the costs of premiums and give customers more choices for health insurance plans.
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Major healthcare insurer Anthem will only offer Obamacare exchange plans in roughly half of Kentucky’s 120 counties due to mounting policy uncertainty from Washington and a deteriorating market.
Anthem had earlier planned to offer individual market plans in every county in Kentucky. However, the insurer said that lingering problems with the market and massive federal uncertainty has forced its hand.
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A group of 11 states and the District of Columbia running their own Obamacare exchanges want more federal funding to stabilize exchanges facing higher premiums and insurer defections.
The states wrote to leaders of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with their ideas on Tuesday. Those include guaranteeing insurer payments and establishing a permanent reinsurance fund to help insurers.
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Residents in every U.S. county are expected to have at least one insurer to buy coverage from on Obamacare’s exchange when open enrollment starts in November, but several difficult decisions lie ahead for customers, particularly those who will not receive any help paying for their premiums.
Those customers are facing significantly higher costs for their policies, and those whose current insurer isn’t providing coverage for 2018, whether subsidized or not, likely will have to change doctors and hospitals to make sure they aren’t slammed with high out-of-pocket medical expenses.
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A bipartisan Senate health panel is set to meet on Obamacare in September, but lawmakers disagree on funding for insurer payments that would otherwise lead to more exits from health insurance companies and higher premiums for people who don’t receive subsidies.
Members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are holding hearings Sept. 6-7 to discuss how to keep premiums from rising much more than they are, particularly if the payments, called cost-sharing reduction subsidies, or CSRs, are not funded. If cut off, a Congressional Budget Office analysis found, premiums would rise by an average of 20 percent next year.
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich said he and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper are planning to release proposals as early as next week on how to repair Obamacare’s exchanges.
“We’re getting very close,” Kasich, a Republican, said in a joint interview with Hickenlooper on Colorado Public Radio on Monday. “I just talked to my guys today, men and women who are working on this with John’s people, and we think we’ll have some specifics here … I think we could have it within a week.”
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The federal government owes health insurer Molina $52 million for payments it was supposed to receive involving losses under Obamacare, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled Friday.
The payments, called “risk corridors,” were diminished as part of a spending bill advanced by Republicans, who referred to them as a “bailout” for the insurance industry. Withholding them contributed to losses for insurers and to the shutdown of nonprofit insurance co-ops created under the law.
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Health insurer Aetna announced Thursday that it would completely withdraw from the Obamacare exchanges in 2018, after seeing its profits soar from reducing its participation this year.
The company said during an earnings call that it was withdrawing from the exchange in Nevada, the last state it had considered staying in. Aetna was leaving the possibility open because it was applying for a Medicaid managed care contract, and the state gives extra consideration to insurers that participate in both programs.
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With the Republican Senate failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act last week, the administration and Congress should consider paying greater attention to the healthcare problems of 2009.
When I graduated medical school in 2009, as the nation debated healthcare reform and the future of our healthcare system, the main challenges impeding doctors and patients were obvious to me. They included a rigid and perverse physician reimbursement system, a labyrinth of increasingly complicated, costly, and sometimes contradictory mandates and priorities, and a runaway malpractice system.
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