Iowa’s lone ObamaCare insurer has requested a 57 percent rate increase for 2018, citing uncertainty over how the Trump administration will handle the healthcare law.
In a revised rate request, Medica on Wednesday asked for an increase 13 percentage points higher than its original request filed in June.
Medica and other insurers have worried about whether the Trump administration will continue funding key Obamacare payments known as cost-sharing reductions.
The Trump administration is giving insurance companies an extra three weeks to decide whether to offer insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act markets, and how much to charge.
The extension comes as insurance companies wait for President Trump to decide whether he will continue to make payments to insurance companies that are called for under the Affordable Care Act but that some Republicans have opposed.
The payments — known as cost-sharing reduction payments — reimburse insurance companies for discounts on copayments and deductibles that they’re required by law to offer to low-income customers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the payments this year would be about $7 billion.
Insurers are making final decisions about their Obamacare rates for next year. So far, it looks as if many of them will be building in an uncertainty tax.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has compiled proposed insurance prices for coverage in 21 large American cities next year. The rates remain subject to change as insurers and regulators continue to negotiate. But the Kaiser researchers have done similar analyses over the last few years and found the proposed rates to be roughly predictive of the national trend.
Two themes stick out: One is that, while insurance premiums will rise substantially in many cities, the increases are generally not bigger than they were last year. The other is that insurers are being quite explicit about citing the Trump administration’s hostile policy messages as a substantial reason for the higher prices.
The Trump administration, thwarted in several attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, notably shifted tone Wednesday, opening the door for a bipartisan plan to “fix” the law.
“Both folks in the House and the Senate, on both sides of the aisle frankly, have said that Obamacare doesn’t work, and it needs to be either repealed or fixed,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said on Fox & Friends. “So the onus is on Congress.”
Congress has done the unthinkable: started down a bipartisan path toward fixing a broken health-care system.
Over the past week, the House and Senate set forward plans to fix problems plaguing Obamacare. The move is a stark departure from the previous Republican plans of replacing Obamacare altogether or repealing it and punting on a solution until a later date. While it’s a welcome change in strategy that’s more likely to gain traction than repeal/replace plans, the bipartisan efforts fall short of addressing four key areas instrumental to stabilizing the Affordable Care Act for the long run.
The two recently announced bipartisan plans take different approaches to fixing Obamacare, and the differences are immediately apparent.
President Donald Trump’s bold threat to push “Obamacare” into collapse may get harder to carry out after a new court ruling.
The procedural decision late Tuesday by a federal appeals panel in Washington has implications for millions of consumers. The judges said that a group of states can defend the legality of government “cost-sharing” subsidies for copays and deductibles under the Affordable Care Act if the Trump administration decides to stop paying the money.
While arguing against getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and former health policy advisor in the administration of Barack Obama, told CNBC on Tuesday that Republicans and Democrats need to put politics aside to tweak urgent problems with the 2010 health-care law.
“We need to have a timeline that’s over the next few months that’s going to stabilize the exchanges, but primarily try to bring the premiums down in the exchanges,” said Emanuel, an architect of the ACA, better known as Obamacare. He’s currently chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
