Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
GOP focuses on fixing weak spots
Hearings to begin next month as repeal push fades
Senate begins bipartisan health care approach with plans for hearings on Obamacare, switching its effort from rolling back the law.
WASHINGTON — Even as President Donald Trump renews his threat to undermine the Affordable Care Act, senior Republican and Democratic senators announced plans Tuesday to begin work on a new bipartisan effort to stabilize the 2010 health care law, also known as Obamacare.
The move — by Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, RTenn., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the committee’s senior Democrat — does not ensure the end of the GOP’s long Obamacare repeal campaign.
But in the wake of last week’s collapse of the Senate GOP repeal effort, it signaled a new willingness by Republican senators to begin work on fixing weaknesses with the law rather than trying to roll it back.
In a statement and a series of messages on Twitter in which he set the schedule for the Senate for the rest of August, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., notably didn’t include health care.
The effort by Alexander and Murray will begin with a series of hearings starting the week of Sept. 4, Alexander said Tuesday, announcing his interest in finishing legislation by the end of that month to head off potentially large insurance-rate hikes for 2018.
“Any solution that Congress passes for 2018 stabilization package would need to be small, bipartisan and balanced,” he said as he invited the committee’s Democrats to participate in the process.
The Senate hearings could complement a bipartisan effort in the House, where a group of Republicans and Democrats have begun meeting to talk about fixes to the current law.
Most patient advocates and even many health insurers have been saying for months that targeted fixes to insurance marketplaces make more sense than the kind of far-reaching overhaul of government health programs that Republicans had been pushing.
The marketplaces represent a small part of the U.S. health care system with just about 10 million people getting coverage there.
But rate hikes and the decision by many insurers to exit markets amid the current political uncertainty in Washington have threatened consumers’ access to health plans.
Most independent experts, industry officials and state regulators say stabilizing the markets and controlling premium hikes would be relatively straightforward.
One critical step is funding assistance through Obamacare to low-income consumers to help offset their co-pays and deductibles.
This aid — known as cost-sharing reduction, or CSR, payments — was included in the original law.
But the payments have become a political football as Republicans during the Obama administration successfully argued in federal court that the aid can’t be provided without an appropriation by Congress.
Now Trump administration officials are threatening to cut off the payments, a threat the White House renewed after last week’s Senate votes.
Congress could put an end to that uncertainty by voting to appropriate the CSR money, an idea supported by many lawmakers.
Alexander said Tuesday that he asked the president to continue funding the CSR payments for August and September to give Congress time to appropriate the money.
Most insurance experts and officials also say the federal government must create a better system to protect insurers from big losses if they are hit with very costly patients.
Such reinsurance systems are used in other insurance marketplaces, such as the Medicare Part D prescription drug program and are seen as critical to stabilizing markets.
Whether enough congressional Republicans will back such an effort to stabilize insurance markets remains unclear.
Many GOP lawmakers continue to be interested in rolling back Obamacare and dramatically cutting funding for health care safety net programs such as Medicaid.
Three Senate Republicans — Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Dean Heller of Nevada — have been talking about a new repeal plan with the White House in recent days.
And Tuesday, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., warned that many Republicans are unlikely to vote for a bill that simply commits more federal money to Obamacare insurance markets.
But the appetite for a new repeal push seems limited among GOP congressional leaders. And Republicans face mounting political pressure not to let the current law collapse. Polls indicate that Americans now hold congressional Republicans and the Trump administration responsible for the fate of the nation’s health care system.
“There’s just too much animosity and we’re too divided on health care,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in an interview Monday with Reuters.
“I think we ought to acknowledge that we can come back to health care afterward, but we need to move ahead on tax reform,” Hatch said. Lisa Mascaro in Washington, D.C., contributed.