WAIT, I MISSED THIS: The Trump Administration DIDN’T INCLUDE OFF-EXCHANGE ACA POLICIES in their 100K - 200K projection?? I heard something about it but assumed they were just pulling numbers out of their asses. This is actually worse in some ways. https://t.co/S2qJetjdTS
It's important to keep in mind that they knew damned well that killing the mandate penalty without replacing it with some other type of "negative inducement" to encourage people to enroll in a fully ACA-compliant policy was a really, really bad idea. Proof? Both the GOP House and Senate versions of their ACA "replacement" bill included an alternative to the mandate penalty:
Under the AHCA, the individual mandate is wiped out...except it's replaced with a 30% premium surcharge for people who don't maintain continuous coverage for more than 2 months.
(sigh) OK, gather 'round children, and let me tell you the story of how Cost Sharing Reductions went from being a thorn in the side of the Obama Administration to becoming a massive tree branch jammed into the kidney of Congressional Republicans. The following is an updated version of a lengthy post of mine from about six months ago.
The Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payment controversy has only really been sucking up a huge amount of political and policy oxygen for the past year and a half, since Donald Trump took office, but actually started long before then. Why? Because the whole reason the CSR payments were discontinued in the first place is a federal lawsuit filed by John Boehner on behalf of the House Republican Caucus back in 2014.
(sigh) Dammit, sure enough, as I expected, the full Michigan state Senate has gone ahead and passed the state Senator Mike Shirkey's "God's Safety Net" bill which would impose 29-hour-plus work requirements on 680,000 low-income Medicaid enrollees even though the vast majority of them already work, go to school, are medically fragile, take care of other medical fragile family members, elderly relatives or children and so forth. It was, as you'd expect, a party-line vote:
Able-bodied Medicaid recipients in Michigan may soon have to choose between finding a job or losing health insurance.
...Democrats condemned the proposal as harmful to thousands of Medicaid recipients who would not meet the several exemptions spelled out in SB 897 and said such a move is also illegal. Majority Republicans brushed aside those objections, and the bill passed 26-11.
I've repeatedly written about how Donald Trump is still deperately trying to sabotage the ACA by any means necessary. Last year it was all about a combination of regulatory and legislative attacks, but aside from repealing the ACA's individual mandate (which was, admittedly, a pretty ugly blow), the GOP-held Congress was unsuccessful at tearing it down legislatively.
Therefore, for 2018, Trump has decided to double down on the regulatory side...and one of the main ways he hopes to achieve this is by opening up the floodgates on so-called "Short-Term, Limited Duration" policies, which aren't subject to most ACA requirements and therefore are a) free to siphon off healthy ACA-compliant enrollees into b) substandard healthcare plans which can leave thousands of people in dire straits.
Two more Democratic senators are introducing a bill that would create a version of Medicare for some working-age Americans, offering yet another sign that government-run insurance will figure prominently into the Democratic Party’s health care agenda going forward.
By my count, there are now a total of 5 different Universal Coverage policies officially on the table from Congressional Democrats, in addition to the two "ACA 2.0" bills proposed (both of which are presumably meant as stopgap measures until one of the UC bills can also get passed and take hold and be implemented a few years later). These bills include ones from Bernie Sanders ("Medicare for All"); Tim Kaine/Michael Bennet ("Medicare X"); Brian Schatz ("Medicaid Option"); and my preferred option of those I've seen so far, the plan from the Center for American Progress ("Medicare Extra"). The newest entry from Sen. Merkley & Murphy is apparently called "Medicare Part E":
Over at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Karen Pollitz and Gary Claxton have published a handy explainer which goes over the basics of the various types of NON-ACA individual market policies...specifically, the "Short Term" and "Association" plans which Donald Trump is attempting to flood the market with by essentially removing any restrictions or regulations on them, but also the "Idaho Style" plans which were rejected by HHS for being flat-out illegal as well as the "Farm Bureau" junk plans which Iowa recently decided to open the floodgates on (Tennessee already had a similar setup, and sure enough, it has proven pretty devastating to Tennessee's ACA market since 2014 as a result). The whole thing is worth a read, but in the early part of their explainer, however, they also happened to neatly lend support to my estimates from last week regarding the unsubsidized market:
...Maitre, 62, spends dozens of hours each week babysitting her grandchildren and providing their working parents with free child care. But none of that time or her community service would count as work under an advancing plan that would require Medicaid recipients to spend 29 hours a week at a job or risk losing their health care coverage.
...The Republican-led Senate Competitiveness Committee approved the legislation a short time later in a 4-1 vote. The lone committee Democrat voted against the plan to reform the government health care program for lower-income residents, which has grown significantly in recent years after the state expanded eligibility under former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
It now moves on to the full state Senate, as I expected.
NOTE: I'm well aware that the math below is of the "back of the envelope" variety and has a lot of caveats and assumptions.
Today is Tax Day, so I decided to do a fun little exercise (OK, it's not fun for those getting stuck with the bill).
Last week I crunched the numbers and determined that roughly 6.5 million middle-class Americans enrolled in individual market policies are being hit with an average health insurance premium hike of around $960 apiece this year specifically caused by the various sabotage efforts put forth by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans last year. This primarily consisted of the CSR remimbursement payment cut-off, but also included smaller factors like threats (later made reality) to not enforce and/or repeal the individual mandate; slashing marketing/outreach budgets by 90% and 40% respectively; and so forth.
I have mixed feelings about private health insurance companies and, by extension, health insurance brokers.
On the one hand, as a universal coverage advocate who'd prefer that it be pretty much all publicly funded, I see private, profit-based insurance carriers as a middleman which shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
On the other hand, until the day comes where universal coverage via a single Medicare-for-All-like national healthcare system, insurance carriers are necessary, and since they offer a variety of different policies with different networks, coverage features, premiums, deductibles, co-pays and so forth, that means a lot of hand-holding is also necessary.
