Sen. Mark Warner's Health Care Improvement Act of 2021 (S.352)
Sen. Michael Bennet & Sen. Tim Kaine's re-introduced "Medicare X" Act (S.386, I believe)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's Improving Health Care Affordability Act (S.499)
Of the three, the one which seems most likely to actually have a shot at passing both the House and Senate and being signed into law by President Biden during the 2021 - 2022 legislative session is Sen. Shaheen's S.499, which would:
Back in late January, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia announced the introduction of a new-ish bill called the Health Care Improvement Act of 2021. Tell me if any of the major provisions look familiar:
Capping health care costs on the ACA exchanges
Establishing a low-cost public health care option
Authorizing the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices
Allowing insurers to offer health care coverage across state boundaries
Supporting state-run reinsurance programs
Incentivizing states to expand Medicaid
Expanding Medicaid eligibility for new moms
Simplifying enrollment
Increasing Medicaid funding for states with high levels of unemployment
This afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office released their 10-year "score" report of the largest single chunk of the House Democrats version of the American Rescue Plan from the Ways & Means Committee:
Legislation Summary
S. Con. Res. 5, the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2021, instructed several committees of the House of Representatives to recommend legislative changes that would increase deficits up to a specified amount over the 2021-2030 period. As part of this reconciliation process, the House Committee on Ways and Means approved legislation on February 10 and 11, 2021, with a number of provisions that would increase deficits. The legislation would extend unemployment benefits, establish a pandemic emergency fund, increase subsidies for health insurance, provide cash payments to eligible people, expand several tax credits, and modify rules for pensions, among other provisions designed to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the coronavirus.
The Ways and Means’ proposals comprise half of the $1.9 trillion Democratic COVID-19 relief package
SPRINGFIELD, MA – Today, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-MA) announced the Committee will consider nine legislative proposals under the budget reconciliation instructions this week as the next step in delivering COVID-19 relief to the American people. Beginning on Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. through Friday, February 12, 2021, the Committee will markup proposals spanning from extending unemployment insurance to expanding the child tax credit to delivering another round of direct assistance to struggling Americans.
UPDATE: Everything below refers to HR 369, but the American Rescue Plan, HR 1319, contains a virtually identical expansion of ACA subsidies...if only for two years.
Note that under HR 1319 (AmRescuePlan), the first year would be retroactive, meaning that current ACA enrollees should receive additional subsidies dating back to January 2021, though I don't know what form that will take...rebate checks, credit towards future premiums or an extra tax refund next spring.
Over the past couple of years, one of the things I've become known for is my obsessive fixation on visually displaying how much various households would save on healthcare premiums if various ACA subsidy-boosting bills were passed compared with the current ACA subsidy structure.
Roughly two to three million people lost employer sponsored health insurance between March and September, and even families who have maintained coverage may struggle to pay premiums and afford care. Further, going into this crisis, 30 million people were without coverage, limiting their access to the health care system in the middle of a pandemic. To ensure access to health coverage, President-elect Biden is calling on Congress to subsidize continuation health coverage (COBRA) through the end of September. He is also asking Congress to expand and increase the value of the Premium Tax Credit to lower or eliminate health insurance premiums and ensure enrollees - including those who never had coverage through their jobs - will not pay more than 8.5 percent of their income for coverage.
Together, these policies would reduce premiums for more than ten million people and reduce the ranks of the uninsured by millions more.
Note: This is the second or third time that I'm cribbing a bit from my friend & colleague Andrew Sprung over at Xpostfactoid. If you like my healthcare policy analysis/writing style and follow me on Twitter, you should follow him at @xpostfactoid as well.
Over at Xpostfactoid, Andrew Sprung beat me to the punch by several days with an excellent two-part look at the "ACA 2.0 Hunger Games" scenario.
During the Democratic primary season, I posted a simple graph which boiled down the four major types of healthcare policy overhaul favored by the various Democratic Presidential candidates...which also largely cover the gamut of systems preferred by various Democratic members of the House and Senate.
It's been a solid year since Joe Biden rolled out his own official healthcare policy proposal. I did a fairly in-depth writeup on it last summer, but it's the understatement of the year to say that "a lot has changed since then".
The two most obvious developments on this front are 1. Biden has gone from one candidate of two dozen to being the presumptive Democratic Nominee; and 2. The COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended not only the Presidential race but the economy and the entire U.S. healthcare system. A third important (if less consequential) development is that the House has actually passed their own "ACA 2.0" bill in the form of H.R. 1425, the Affordable Care Enhancement Act, which partially overlaps Biden's healthcare plan.
