Feds propose fee on insurers in new markets

WASHINGTON — Health insurance companies will have to pay to play in new health insurance markets coming under President Barack Obama’s health care law, the administration said in a proposal issued Friday.

The Health and Human Services department is proposing a “user fee” amounting to 3.5 percent of premiums for insurers who want to offer policies in federal exchanges coming in 2014. The fee is to cover administrative costs of the new markets.

Exchanges are new online markets where consumers will be able to buy individual private policies and apply for government subsidies to help pay their premiums.

About half of the 30 million people expected to gain coverage under the law will get policies in the new exchanges, and the other half will be covered under Medicaid. Washington will run the exchanges in states that decline to do so.

The proposed admin- istrative fee in the new exchanges would be higher than the 2 percent to 3 percent overhead commonly cited for running Medicare, a disparity critics of the law pointed out. But it wasn’t immediately clear whether there’s an apples-toapples comparison between the exchanges and the government program for seniors.

The insurance industry said Friday the fees will increase costs, already expected to rise because the new policies in many cases will be more comprehensive than what is currently available.

“Any new fees to pay for the administration of exchanges will add to the cost of coverage,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. But he stopped short of condemning the surcharges, which ultimately will be passed on to consumers and taxpayers. Instead, he said the government should do everything it can to run the exchanges in an efficient manner.