Obamacare premiums are expected to drop 2 percent nationally next year, and the total number of insurers on the federal exchange will grow for the first time in four years, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Thursday during remarks in Nashville.
Azar credited President Donald Trump for the improving insurance marketplace, saying that Trump had proven “better at managing” the Affordable Care Act, known widely as Obamacare, than the law’s namesake.
A top health official in the Trump administration defended Medicaid work requirements Thursday, arguing that its intent isn’t to expel people from the program.
“Community engagement requirements are not some subversive attempt to just kick people off of Medicaid,” Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a speech in Washington, D.C. “Instead, their aim is to put beneficiaries in control with the right incentives to live healthier, independent lives.”
Small Business Owners say that the most important issue affecting them is the cost of health care, according to the National Small Business Association’s annual Politics of Small Business Survey.
When asked what issues they raised most with elected officials, 40 percent of the surveyed owners said health care costs. Local issues were second on the list at 28 percent and tax reform came third with 37 percent.
Maine’s Republican governor has said federal regulators want to know how Maine would pay for Medicaid expansion. But it’s unclear just how that issue will play out in Maine, the first state to pass Medicaid expansion under Republican President Trump’s administration.
States must file routine paperwork to get federal Medicaid expansion funding under former Democratic President Obama’s signature health care law. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it works to ensure states pay for their share of an expansion with “proper” financing.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice has filed a new lawsuit against the federal government over a fee for health insurers under the Affordable Care Act.
State Attorney General Brad Schimel announced last week the state had filed the lawsuit, along with a motion for a temporary restraining order against President Donald Trump’s Administration, as the deadline nears for Wisconsin to pay more than $30 million through the health insurance providers fee.