Governors: Health insurance markets need legislative help
Bipartisan group asks Congress to push balanced bill.
The chairman of a key health committee said he and other senators are hoping to quickly craft a “small, bipartisan and balanced” bill that would stabilize the individual insurance markets created by the 2010 health law known as Obamacare.
During a health-care hear- ing Thursday in which five governors offered ideas for a bipartisan solution to calm the roiling individual insur- ance market, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, said if lawmakers on Capitol Hill can agree on a bill “we can limit increases in premiums” next year for the roughly 18 million Americans who have bought federally subsidized policies.
In his written opening statement, Alexander said “for seven years” lawmak- ers have “been stuck in this partisan stalemate” about the six percent of Americans who own individual insurance plans “when we really should have been spending
time on” the escalating costs of health care.
Although Ohio Gov. John Kasich was not asked to testify before the committee, his political ally – Demo- cratic Colorado Gov. John
Hickenlooper – did appear before the panel, the Sen- ate Health Education and Labor Committee.
Last week, Kasich and Hickenlooper unveiled a plan to stabilize the Obamacare individual insurance mar- kets. Their plan calls for the federal government to con
tinue the cost-sharing payments to insurance com- panies that reduce deductibles and co-pays for lower-income people.
Kasich is scheduled to talk about the plan in Washing- ton Friday at a session sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and Center for American Progress, both non-profit organizations that deal with public policy.
Like Kasich and Hickenlooper, Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee, are focusing on trying to stabilize the indi-
vidual insurance markets while deferring talk of deal- ing with the rapidly growing costs in Medicaid.
Hickenlooper told the committee members that “it is refreshing to see this work being done on a bipartisan basis.”
The effort to devise a bipar- tisan solution was sparked after congressional Repub- licans failed this summer to scrap Obamacare and approve a more market-oriented health-care system.
O bamacare e xtended
insurance 40 percent of the roughly 46 million Americans in 2010 not insured by their employers, not old enough to qualify for Medicare or earned too much money to be eligible for Medicaid, the joint federal and state program that provides coverage for low-income people.
The law expanded eligibility for Medicaid to allow families of four earning as much as $34,000 a year to qualify. Kasich relied on that section to take billions of federal dollars to cover more than 700,000 low-income people in Ohio.
In addition, the federal or state governments established exchanges in each state on which insurance companies offered four poli- cies — bronze, silver, gold and platinum. A family of four earning as much as $98,000 a year could use federal tax credits to buy any of those plans.
For families of four earning up to $61,000 a year, there was an additional ben- efit. If they bought a silver plan, the federal government offered cost-sharing subsidies to reduce deductibles or other out-of-pocket expenses.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan, health-research organiza
tion in Washington, calculated that 7.1 million of the 12.2 million people who bought policies through the exchanges receive cost-shar
ing payments, concluding that the payments reduced out-of-pocket expenses for the typical family by roughly $5,500 a year.
House Republicans challenged the cost-sharing payments in federal court, contending that President Barack Obama spent the money without a specific congressional appropriation. A federal judge ruled in favor of the GOP but allowed the payments to continue while the case was appealed.
President Donald Trump has threatened to end the subsidies, but his administration has continued to make the payments.