Senate may strip down Obamacare even more
WASHINGTON — Conservative senators are pushing to diminish insurance-coverage requirements imposed by President Barack Obama’s health-care law as Senate Republicans try fashioning legislation overhauling the nation’s health-care system.
Their ideas include erasing Obama consumer protections, such as barring higher premiums for people with pre-existing medical conditions, but allowing states to opt into them.
That’s a more conservative twist on the health-care bill the House narrowly approved last week. That measure retains the coverage protections but lets states get waivers to drop some of them.
Conservatives are also talking about curbing the health-care tax credits that Republicans want to provide and slowing the growth of the Medicaid program for poor and disabled people.
Obama’s insurance requirements are among the most-popular aspects of his 2010 law, and conservatives’ chances of annulling them in whatever bill GOP senators produce are uncertain. They’re getting pushback from morecentrist Republicans.
The effort is one example of the flashpoints senators face as they begin their closed-door effort to write the legislation.
“We’re going to leave it up to consumers to decide what they want to buy, what they need, so we’re going to eliminate mandates, not add them,” No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Thursday, referring to Obama’s coverage requirements. But he added, “We haven’t made any decisions.”
Conservative Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, would like to eliminate Obama’s requirement that insurers offer coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and charge them the same premiums they charge healthy customers, a GOP aide said.
Lee also would like to erase Obama’s mandate that insurers cover a range of services such as maternity care and prescriptions, and the limitation that insurers charge older customers a maximum of three times more what they charge younger ones.
The House-passed bill continues to face strong public opposition, a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday said. The poll found that only 21 percent of voters approve of the House-passed bill, while 56 percent disapprove.
Meanwhile, early moves by insurers suggest that another round of price hikes and limited choices will greet insurance shoppers when they start searching for next year’s coverage on the public markets established by the Affordable Care Act.
Price-increase requests are only just starting to be revealed by state regulators, but in recent weeks big insurers like Aetna and Humana have been dropping out of markets or saying that they aren’t ready to commit. And regulators in Virginia and Maryland have reported early price-hike requests ranging from just under 10 percent to more than 50 percent.
“For the consumer, they’re going to see big rate hikes,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown Health Policy Institute.
Evaporating competition isn’t helping.
With the latest departures, more than 40 percent of U.S. counties would have only one insurer selling coverage on their marketplaces for next year, according to data compiled by The Associated Press and the consulting firm Avalere. That assumes no other insurers leave and none step in by the time customers start shopping for coverage in the fall.
The nation’s third-largest insurer, Aetna, said Wednesday that it will join Humana in completely leaving the exchanges for 2018.
For now, eight states appear to be down to one insurer: Alaska, Alabama, Delaware, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming.