The following article by Margot Sanger-Katz and Kevin Quealy was posted on the New York Times website October 27, 2017:
The rates for next year’s Obamacare plans are out, and they show how President Trump’s actions have scrambled the insurance marketplace.
Usually, plans known as gold have higher monthly premiums but lower out-of-pocket costs than “silver” plans, which have tended to cost less each month and have been the most popular plans.
The following article by Robert Pear was posted on the New York Times website October 21, 2017:
President Trump with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky as he signed an executive order on health care at the White House this month. Credit Evan Vucci/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In signing a recent executive order, President Trump promised that millions of Americans could soon obtain “great, great health care” through inexpensive plans that offer consumers options they had been denied under the Affordable Care Act.
But these health plans, created for small businesses, have a darker side: They have a long history of fraud and abuse that have left employers and employees with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid medical bills.
The following article by Griffin Connolly was posted on the Roll Call website October 20, 2017:
After reaching record low in 2016, uninsured rate has steadily crept up as 2010 health law’s future remains uncertain
President Donald Trump announced last week his administration is ending cost-sharing reduction payments that help insurance companies pay part of lower- and middle-income people’s coverage costs. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)
Roughly 3.5 million more Americans are uninsured compared to the last quarter of 2016, a new survey found.
An ongoing Gallup-Sharecare survey that has asked at least 500 randomly sampled people each day since 2008 whether they have insurance shared its 2017 third-quarter results Friday.
The uninsured rate among adults was 12.3 percent as of Sept. 30. That’s up 1.4 percent from the third and fourth quarters of 2016, when the uninsured rate reached a record low of 10.9 percent.
The following article by Griffin Connolly was posted on the Roll Call website October 18, 2017:
Two senators reached bipartisan deal Tuesday to fund cost-reducing subsidies
Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., reached an agreement Tuesday to fund cost-sharing reduction payments the president axed from the executive schedule last week. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Most Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump’s decision to end Obama-era federal subsidies to insurers that lower costs for low- and middle-income families, a new poll found.
Fifty-three percent of respondents to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted Oct. 15 and 16 said they disapproved of the executive move, compared to 31 percent who were in favor. Sixteen percent declined to give an opinion.
While President Trump continues to display remarkable volte-face on health reform, 18 million American’s are at risk of experiencing another increase in their premiums.
The fate of the bipartisan health bill that sought to fund necessary cost-sharing payments for the individual market has likely been sealed, at least in the short-term. It would be all but impossible for Republican lawmakers to support the deal – let alone bring it up for a vote – without the president’s or Speaker Ryan’s endorsement. After flip-flopping his stance on the bill, President Trump won’t commit to anything but full repeal out of spite for President Obama.
While the GOP remains steadfast on playing party politics, Democrats remain willing and cooperative to work on necessary reforms. Republican’s are tasked with supporting Trump’s agenda or caring for American’s that need their help. All the while Minnesota and the rest of the nation face ramifications of three weeks without reconciliation on the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
The following article was posted on the TrumpAccountable.org website October 19, 2017:
As President Trump’s position on the Alexander-Murray Obamacare stabilization plan whipsawed throughout the day on Tuesday, he started to use the term “bailout” more and more to describe the subsidies that help the neediest Americans afford health care.
To be clear: Providing funds for Americans who need health insurance is not a bailout of the insurance companies. It’s support for our aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters who need help with cancer treatment, pre-natal care, or surgery.
When the financial industry, fueled by greed and gross mismanagement, brought the U.S economy to the brink of a depression, the big banks needed a bailout. The bank bailout cost taxpayers an estimated 700 billion dollars. The banks made poor decisions (and lots of money) leading up to the crash and taxpayers bailed them out.
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump can call them bailouts, but the Obamacare subsidies are simply a way to help Americans pay for health insurance.
The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website October 13, 2017:
President Trump on October 4, 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
This article has been updated.
Let’s set aside for the moment President Trump’s decision to end Obamacare’s cost-sharing reduction payments (CSRs) to insurers, a system under which insurers are subsidized to help keep costs low for low-income insurance recipients.
Let’s also set aside the other ways in which the Trump administration has been deliberately undermining enrollment in the Obamacare marketplaces. We’ll set aside that the administration has slashed funding to outreach programs by as much as 92 percent, ended partnerships with state groups aimed at getting people enrolled, cut funding for advertising the enrollment period and even decided it would shut down the enrollment website for 12 hours a week for maintenance. Continue reading “Trump’s not going to be able to avoid blame for kneecapping Obamacare”
The following article by Profession J.B. Silvers was posted on the Conversation website October 13, 2017:
Credit: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump has issued the first of what promises to be a series of health insurance executive orders aimed at dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
It instructs the government to essentially exempt small businesses and potentially individuals from some of the rules underpinning the landmark legislation known as “Obamacare,” following the GOP’s failureto get Congress to approve a plan to repeal and replace it.
These steps would free more employers to access bare-bones and short-term health insurance coverage and join together to bargain with insurers. It’s not clear how this order will change the U.S. health insurance market. But as a health finance professor and the former CEO of an insurance company, I’m confident it is more likely to compound many of Obamacare’s problems than to fix them.
In particular, many smaller employers have seen their costs rise dramatically since insurers were forced to price their plans based on the average of all claims in the small group market rather than the experience of each firm.
But there is a reason why Obamacare was designed this way. Employers with older and less healthy workers were almost shut out of the insurance market because insurers deemed them so costly to cover and wanted to avoid the risk. Companies with younger and healthier workers had a good deal previously, but many other employers did not.
The Affordable Care Act was supposed to solve this problem by lumping everyone together to even out rates. Making rates more reasonable for many Americans meant requiring some of us to pay more.
Market dynamics
The government’s attempt to keep President Barack Obama’s oft-repeated promise that “if you like your current plan, you can keep it” didn’t help. Employers with low-cost plans and healthier workforces chose to be grandfathered out of many new requirements, leaving a much less healthy – and more expensive to cover – pool for pricing everyone else’s insurance.
Nevertheless, the share of adults without health insurance fell to a record low of 10.9 percent in late 2016, from 18 percent before the health insurance exchanges opened in October 2013, as measured by polling by Gallup and Sharecare. (The uninsurance rate has ticked up to 11.7 percent since Trump took office.)
What would be a good way to get the remaining 28 million Americansinsured at a reasonable cost? It may seem obvious that letting small businesses without much purchasing power in the health insurance market band together will enable them to get the same deals as large self-insured companies – which get to choose among a variety of options.
In most markets, this kind of diversity and choice fosters the robust competition Trump says he wants to see. But in health insurance, this may lead to fragmentation and market failure.
That’s because as insurers scramble for ideal customers – those least likely to get sick – they drive higher-risk people away by charging them higher premiums and making them foot a bigger share of their medical bills. Unfortunately, the latter (people often with preexisting conditions and requiring long-term treatment) really need medical care and the insurance coverage required to get it.
Because of this, all but the largest of the association health plans that the executive order is supposed to encourage still will most likely exclude high-risk individuals and employers, just as they have in the past, as health law expert Tim Jost predicts.
How will the vulnerable get health care?
Trump said that his executive order will help “millions and millions of people.” But I believe it is more likely to drive coverage for many out of reach while benefiting the Americans whose insurance needs are relatively minimal.
One could argue that the government should never have tried to force healthier people to pay so much more for coverage to make it affordable for everyone else. Yet the nation needs a mechanism to help Americans with chronic and preexisting conditions pay for the medical care they need.
Establishing high-risk pools is one way to make this work, and they definitely can help as long as there is funding available. Unfortunately, most attempts to handle high-risk individuals this way have run out of money and left vulnerable patients high and dry. Trump’s approach does nothing to deal with this.
Any solution that makes health insurance more affordable across the board will need to be comprehensive. I believe Trump is instead embarking on a process that is both naïve and piecemeal based on wishful thinking regarding the power of markets to resolve all the problems with this difficult sector.
During his signing ceremony, he promised that the policies established by the order would “cost the government virtually nothing.” If that proves true, it is likely that we will receive exactly what we pay for.
The following article by Jamila Taylor and Nikita Mhatre was posted on the Center for American Progress website October 6, 2017:
Over the past several months, the Trump-Pence administration, as well as Congress, have attacked women’s health and rights numerous times. Greater access to affordable and effective contraception has been one of the hallmark achievements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But now, the current administration is threatening to limit these gains with the release of sweeping regulations that would allow any employer, insurance plan, school, or individual to use the guise of religious or moral objection to deny access to no-cost contraception.
The following article was posted on the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy website October 4, 2017:
The “tax reform framework” released by the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders on September 27 would not benefit everyone in Minnesota equally. The richest one percent of Minnesota residents would receive 62.2 percent of the tax cuts within the state under the framework in 2018. These households are projected to have an income of at least $632,000 next year. The framework would provide them an average tax cut of $65,780 in 2018, which would increase their income by an average of 2.5 percent.
