Health Insurance - Senate Democrats Want To Stop Trump From Bringing Back Junk Health Insurance
Sen. Tammy Baldwin
(D-Wis.) and 30 Democratic colleagues want to block a Trump
administration regulation that could flood health insurance markets with
junk coverage.
The
effort seems unlikely to succeed. It requires passing a bill that would
ultimately need support from both the Republican-controlled House of
Representatives and President Donald Trump himself.
But
Baldwin’s gambit could force her GOP colleagues to declare publicly
whether they support this latest effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s insurance reforms ― and to do so shortly the midterm elections, amid polling that shows voters care a lot about those reforms.
The impetus for all of this is a rule that the Trump administration had been promising since January and finalized
in early August. The rule will make it easier for people to buy and
then hold onto “short-term, limited-duration” plans, which, as the name
suggests, are supposed to serve as temporary stopgaps for people with
brief lapses in coverage.
Short-term
policies are exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s rules, which means
they don’t have to include benefits like behavioral health, maternity
care and prescription drugs that the 2010 health care law deemed
essential.
Insurers
also don’t have to sell short-term policies to people who already have
medical conditions. When beneficiaries file claims, insurers who sell
these plans can scour medical records for evidence that the conditions
were there all along.
Precisely
because short-term plans don’t end up paying out many big medical
bills, they tend to be a lot cheaper than comprehensive policies. The
Trump administration says that makes the plans a valuable alternative
for people who buy coverage on their
own, don’t get tax subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, also known
as “Obamacare,” and as a result, face high premiums.
Those
high premiums are likely the major reason that enrollment among these
unsubsidized customers now seems to be falling, according to a recent
analysis from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
But
Baldwin, who has supported past initiatives to bolster the Affordable
Care Act as well as proposals to replace private insurance with a single government program, thinks short-term plans don’t solve the problem and could make things worse.
In a Tuesday meeting with reporters, she echoed a chorus of experts and state officials ― warning that
consumers might not understand the limits of what they are buying and
that, as short-term plans lure people in good health, insurers will have
to raise premiums for everybody else.
“It is sabotage, in my mind,” Baldwin said.
Baldwin’s bill to stop the regulation from taking effect falls under the Congressional Review Act,
which means that it can get a floor vote with the support of just 30
senators ― exactly the number of co-sponsors on the bill ― and that it
can pass with a simple majority.
If
all 49 Democrats in the Senate support the bill, they would need just
one or two Republicans to join them, depending on whether the seat of
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died Saturday, remains vacant.
Baldwin
said Tuesday that she had already approached two GOP senators, Susan
Collins of Maine and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, about
supporting the resolution. Collins was one of three Republican senators
who voted against the GOP’s repeal bill in the summer of 2017, defeating
it, and she has recently reiterated her support for the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
source : https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/baldwin-trump-pre-existing-junk_us_5b85f8ade4b0cf7b0030086f
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