Congress Moves Toward Bipartisan Approaches to Address Healthcare Issues
A spirit of bipartisanship in Congress seems to be rising from the rubble of the failed Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The first test of this new bipartisanship approach will come this month when the White House must make the next round of government cost sharing reduction payments to insurance carriers on August 21 that fund the subsidies for the health insurance obtained by about seven million Americans through the Healthcare Marketplace.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014 went to court to stop the Obama administration from making the payments, saying that the funds were not authorized by Congress. A federal judge agreed in May 2016, ruling that the government payments to insurers were illegal. The judge has allowed the payments to continue while the court case is appealed. President Trump has threatened to halt the payments.
However, Senator Lamar Alexander, the Republican chair of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, say they will work together to hold hearings next month to discuss bipartisan legislation for a one-year extension of the federal payments to insurers. Insurers believe that insurance rates will rise and more insurers will abandon state markets if these government payments do not continue. Insurers are scheduled to file 2018 rates in the next couple of weeks and make final decisions about participation in state health insurance exchanges by late September.
Over in the House, a bipartisan group of more than 40 House members calling themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus is working along a parallel path. Their five-point plan to address concerns with the ACA includes mandatory funding for government payments to insurance companies to reduce insurance costs for qualifying Americans and creating a fund for states to reduce premiums and limit insurer losses. The group also wants to see the employer shared responsibility provision changed to exclude companies with fewer than 500 full-time employees from being required to provide insurance to full-time workers rather than the current requirement that requires companies with 50 or more full-time employees to do so.
Another group of House Democrats are speaking with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy about a proposal that Republican Senator Susan Collins and he proposed that would establish a system to automatically enroll people into insurance plans.
It remains to be seen if any of this spirit of bipartisanship will result in positive steps to improve the ACA.
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