Health care

own program for distribut- ing the subsidy money.

That power will remain in the federal government’s hands under the new waiver request.

Those big changes were also perhaps the diciest proposals legally. Now those won’t be legal hurdles.

The original waiver plan “was fundamentally unap- provable,” said Christen Young, former deputy sec- retary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and a fellow at the center-left-lean- ing Brookings Institution.

If Georgia wanted to make its claims in the orig- inal request come true, she maintained the state would have had to put millions of dollars more into the subsidy pool. “There there was just no way to make the numbers add up,” Young said.

Some conservatives had praised Kemp’s move, though, saying it gave consumers a better range of choices of plans and would be more financially respon- sible.

Kemp still hopes to block Georgians’ access to the federal healthcare.gov website where they currently can shop for p lans and browse insurance agents in their area. Instead the state would encourage Geor- gians to buy directly from insurance companies or private websites. Kemp’s proposal says that healthcare. gov could instead redirect Georgians to a state website, called “Georgia Access,” that would streamline their experience.

Critics maintain that this proposal doesn’t appear to add a new benefit to consumers, but rather takes an option away.

What is likely to have little if any legal trouble is the waiver request’s most expensive and best understood provision, the reinsurance program.

Reinsurance is a tried-andtrue program that uses state tax money to subsidize existing private insurance companies. Essentially, the state agrees to pay some of the biggest insurance claims that come in in a given year, in the hopes the insurance companies’ savings trickle down to consumers. Evidence has shown that consumers do get lower prices when reinsurance has been tried in other states.

That provision was estimated to cost the state and federal governments $300 million in its first year. The savings in premium prices would be perhaps 4% for people in metro Atlanta, but bigger for people in rural areas, as much as a quarter. The state is accepting public comment until July 23, with a public meeting Wednesday at dch.georgia. gov/events.