It’s a good thing Democrats made health insurance “affordable” when they passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010. I’d hate to see how much health insurance would cost if it were expensive.
The Kaiser Family Foundation just released its annual survey of employer-sponsored coverage, finding that the average premium for family coverage increased 5 percent to $19,616.
A group of free-market health care reformers have developed a reform that would sharply reduce premiums for individuals, wouldn’t cause millions to lose coverage, and would save taxpayers money.
Called the “Health Care Choices Proposal,” it would continue to have the government subsidize individual insurance, but would do so through block grants to states, rather than payments to insurance companies under ObamaCare.
The plan would let consumers apply subsidies to any type of plan they wanted, not just overpriced ObamaCare plans. And to lower insurance costs, it would lift many of ObamaCare’s costliest and most disruptive mandates, while continuing to protect those with pre-existing conditions.
And to encourage people to stay insured, the plan would also offer premium discounts for those who continuously enrolled.
Many Republicans, who swept to recent electoral victories by vowing to topple the ACA, are urgently seeking to reassure voters they want to save these protections. Mr. Rohrabacher says he is “taking on both parties” in an effort to do so; his challenger says the congressman is “falling all over himself to scrub his records on health care.”
Such fights are leading to sometimes bitter races across the country involving the ACA, enacted in 2010 under President Obama.
Republicans could try again to repeal Obamacare if they win enough seats in U.S. elections next month, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday, calling a failed 2017 push to repeal the healthcare law a “disappointment.”
In a forecast of 2019 policy goals tempered by uncertainty about who would win the congressional elections, McConnell blamed social programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, for the fast-rising national debt.
FGA asked whether voters support allowing short term health plans to be sold for up to one year, increasing them from the current 3-month maximum.
Voters overwhelmingly support this reform – by a 42-point margin. While Democrats are more skeptical, a solid majority (52 percent) support the idea. Independents strongly support it as well.
We next asked whether voters support allowing consumers to renew these short term plans for up to three years.Support remained strong—and similar to—the first question across party ID.
The text of the Medicare for All bill specifies large and immediate reductions in payments to providers now treating patients under private insurance, cuts of more than 40% for hospitals and 30% for physicians, with these respective cuts growing more severe over time. We do not know the extent to which these cuts would disrupt the supply and timeliness of U.S. healthcare services. But without them, the costs of M4A would be substantially greater than $32.6 trillion in added federal costs over the first ten years.
By the narrowest of margins, the U.S. Senate rejected legislation Wednesday that would have subjected patients with expensive illnesses to soaring premiums, canceled coverage and medical bankruptcy. You might expect such legislation to have been introduced by Republicans and defeated by Democrats, but you’d be wrong. Democrats sought to deny care to the sick. Republicans stopped them.
The Trump administration said late Monday that it will require drugmakers to reveal the list prices of their medicines in television ads. The move sets the stage for months or possibly years of battle with the powerful industry.
The proposed rule would require pharmaceutical companies to include the price in a TV ad for any drug that costs more than $35 a month. The price should be listed at the end of the advertisement in “a legible manner,” the rule states, and should be presented against a contrasting background in a way that is easy to read.
“A crisis of affordability.” That’s what is plaguing the individual health insurance market, according to Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
The culprit? Obamacare. The health law’s regulations have steadily driven up the cost of insurance. Between 2013 — the year before most of Obamacare’s provisions took effect — and 2017, premiums for individual plans doubled. They’re expected to jump another 15 percent next year.
For political professionals, one of the most bizarre aspects of this bizarre era is the speed at which Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders has gone from near irrelevance as the Senate’s resident kook to the most influential policy maker in one of America’s two major political parties. Now comes the moment when Democrats who have largely adopted Sanders positions may have to explain them to voters.