By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--August 3, 2017
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Congressional Republicans moved on Tuesday to defuse President Trump’s threat to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies, maneuvering around the president toward bipartisan legislation to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced that his panel would begin work in early September on legislation to “stabilize and strengthen the individual health insurance market” for 2018. He publicly urged Mr. Trump to continue making payments to health insurance companies to reimburse them for reducing the out-of-pocket medical expenses of low-income people.
In the House, two Republicans, Representatives Tom Reed of New York and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, teamed with Democrats to promote incremental health legislation that would also fund the cost-sharing subsidies. The moves were a remarkable response to the president’s repeated threats to send health insurance markets into a tailspin. They offered tangible indications of cooperation between the parties after Republican efforts to scrap the Affordable Care Act collapsed in the Senate last week, all but ending the seven-year Republican quest to overturn President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.The New York Times acknowledges that many states are once again facing massive insurance rate hikes. They cite California, which has announced a 12.5% average increase for next year. However, without the cost-sharing payments mentioned above, the increase would be at least double that.
In California, the state agency that runs the insurance marketplace announced on Tuesday that rates would increase by 12.5 percent on average next year. That is slightly lower than the rate increases Californians saw this year. But Peter V. Lee, the executive director of the agency, Covered California, said the average increase would be twice as high for popular “silver” plans if the Trump administration blocked the cost-sharing payments. “This policy allowed health plans to stay in the market when they might have left otherwise,” Mr. Lee said of the potential additional increase, which he called a “surcharge.”
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