With the collapse of choice and competition in the Obamacare health insurance exchanges, combined with major premium and deductible increases, “progressives” in Congress are looking for new ways to expand the role of government in Americans’ health care.
Dollars would flow not to insurance companies, but to the states through block grants that would replace Obamacare’s payments to insurers. With new flexibility, states could use the money to lower premiums and stabilize turbulent health insurance markets, among other things.
The Vermont Senate on Tuesday voted to amend a bill which will create a summer study committee to examine potential penalties for not purchasing health insurance in Vermont.
Roughly 400,000 fewer people signed up for Obamacare in 2018, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma announced Tuesday afternoon. That is a significant drop in enrollment from 2017, when 12.2 million Americans obtained coverage through the Obamacare state exchanges.
Legislators are worried that without the threat of an Obamacare-type penalty, some of these young, healthy people will escape the state’s clutches. Hence the new mandate.
Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion program and subsidies have made major health insurance companies extremely profitable, according to a White House economic report released this week.
The omnibus spending bill set to be released Monday will likely contain a provision that would send Obamacare insurers $10 billion in “reinsurance” payments a year for three years — 2019, 2020, and 2021. That’s a bailout.
Republicans campaigned for roughly a decade, promising voters they would dismantle former President Barack Obama’s landmark health care legislation; but one of their own senators is trying to keep it alive through the 2018 election cycle.
If conservatives don’t coalesce behind something soon, they will find themselves bystanders as their GOP colleagues link arms with Democrats to preserve and enlarge Obamacare, not to repeal and replace it.
The nation’s governors and state lawmakers should use every legal means available to them to fix their broken health insurance markets and thus reduce the punishing costs Obamacare is imposing on the residents of their states.
Sen. Claire Ayer and Rep. William Lippert do not want young healthy to drop their insurance. They are seriously considering shutting off this exit ramp for the young and healthy by creating a Vermont individual mandate to buy state-approved insurance.
Many states are eager to reverse the damage from Obamacare in 2018, but in some cases, they will need help from Congress, leading health care experts say.