Judge: Trump’s health care cuts don’t pose immediate threat
SAN FRANCISCO — California and other states have protected consumers from the Trump administration’s decision to cut off “Obamacare’’ health care subsidies, a federal judge said Monday, so people don’t face an immediate threat of higher costs that might lead him to order the payments restarted right away.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria has not issued a ruling but appeared highly skeptical of the request by California and 18 other states to force the government to make the payments as their lawsuit works its way through the courts, which will take months.
State attorneys general, led by California Democrat Xavier Becerra, argue the monthly payments to insurance providers are required under former President Barack Obama’s health care law. Without them, consumers will face higher costs and insurers will back out of the law’s health insurance markets, causing them to fall apart, the states say.
The cost-sharing payments reimburse insurers for providing lower-income people with discounts on out-of-pocket costs. President Donald Trump halted the subsidies earlier this month, criticizing them as insurance company bailouts.
California and other states had anticipated the subsidies would end and found a way to ensure consumers would not pay more for insurance, Chhabria, an Obama appointee, said during a hearing. The states limited the plans for which insurers could hike premiums to make up for the lost subsidies and ensured that many people will get more tax credits for their health insurance purchases, the judge said.
Chhabria peppered an attorney for California with questions about why he should force the administration to resume payments when the states had devised a workaround that would benefit many consumers.