Insurers given more time to calculate 2018 costs

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is giving health-insurance companies more time to calculate price increases for 2018 because of uncertainty caused by the president’s threat to cut off crucial subsidies paid to insurers on behalf of millions of low-income people.

Federal health officials said the deadline for insurers to file their rate requests would be extended by nearly three weeks, to Sept. 5.

Meanwhile, a new survey says that the vast majorities of Americans want Congress and the president to make the current health law work and stop efforts to repeal and replace it.

The extension was announced in a memorandum that insurers received Friday from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the federal insurance marketplace and regulates insurers under the Affordable Care Act.

It was the clearest evidence to date that the politics of health care in Washington could disrupt planning for 2018. Insurers are struggling to decide whether to participate in the marketplace next year and, if so, how much to charge.

In addition to the usual price increases to keep up with medical inflation, many insurers are demanding higher rates because of the possibility that President Donald Trump might take away the subsidies known as cost-sharing reduction payments. The subsidies compensate insurers for reducing deductibles, co-payments and other outof-pocket medical costs for low-income people.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut off the payments as a way to force Democrats to negotiate over the future of the Affordable Care Act.

But in the survey conducted in the first week of August by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly 8 in 10 Americans say Trump should be trying to make the health law work. That includes large majorities of Democrats (95 percent) as well as half of Republicans (52 percent) and President

Trump’s supporters (51 percent).

Almost 6 in 10 people think the Republicans should work with Democrats to improve the health law.

Only 17 percent of the public — and 40 percent of Republicans — think the Trump administration should take steps to make the health law fail, the survey said.

Just 21 percent of respondents — but 49 percent of Republicans — want the GOP to continue working on a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, the survey said.

About 60 percent of people says that Trump and congressional Republicans are responsible for any problems with the health law. Trump has said the public will blame Democrats for any problems.

Still, confusion about the law remains.

Even though only about 10 million people receive

coverage through the marketplaces, about 60 percent of Americans believe that their family will be negatively affected by rising premiums in the marketplaces.

In its latest bulletin, the Trump administration said that many state insurance commissioners had allowed insurers to increase rates for 2018 to account for the ‘‘uncompensated liability’’ that they might face for the cost-sharing reductions.

The amount of the increases varies, but many insurers say that prices will be 15 to 20 percent higher next year because they do not know if they will receive the subsidies they are anticipating.

The future of the subsidies has been uncertain since Republican efforts to repeal major provisions of the Affordable Care Act collapsed last month in the Senate, where three Republicans joined all Democrats in voting down a proposal drafted by the majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.