New insurance guidelines would undermine rules of the Affordable Care Act

[DonViejo]

Source: The Washington Post



By Amy Goldstein November 29 at 12:15 PM

The Trump administration is urging states to tear down pillars of the Affordable Care Act, demolishing a basic rule that federal insurance subsidies can be used only for people buying health plans in marketplaces created under the law.

According to advice issued Thursday by federal health officials, states would be free to redefine the use of those subsidies, which have since 2014 provided the first help the government ever has offered consumers to afford monthly insurance premiums.

States could allow the subsidies to be used for health plans the administration has been promoting outside the ACA marketplaces that are less expensive because they provide skimpier benefits and fewer consumer protections. Even more dramatic, states could let residents with employer-based coverage set up accounts in which they mingle the federal subsidies with health-care funds from their job or personal tax-deferred savings funds to use for premiums or other medical expenses.

If some states take up the administration’s offer, it would undermine the ACA’s central changes to the nation’s insurance system, including the establishment of nationwide standards for many kinds of health coverage sold in the United States.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-insurance-guidelines-would-undermine-rules-of-the-affordable-care-act/2018/11/29/ff467f46-f357-11e8-aeea-b85fd44449f5_story.html

[Apollyonus]

1. Those Republican assholes

Shaking my head

[Hortensis]

2. Speaking of, ruling on that red states' court case to gut the ACA could

be announced any time. But good guys are on it too. CMS is the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

CMS has a plan if federal judge strikes down ACA

The CMS has a plan to protect pre-existing conditions and Americans' access to care even if a federal judge overturns the Affordable Care Act, CMS Adminstrator Seema Verma said Tuesday. A slew of Republican state attorneys general have challenged the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare reform law, and that lawsuit may be decided any day. But the CMS won't be caught flat-footed.

"We want to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions have protections and we want to make sure people have access to affordable coverage," Verma told reporters at a roundtable Tuesday.

Verma wouldn't offer specifics on the plans. ...

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20181127/NEWS/181129954

[progree]

4. CMS and Seema Verma are not, I repeat not, "good guys"

From the Wapo article in the OP

In a midday speech before a gathering of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, Verma delivered a broadside against the health-care law in explaining the rationale for freeing states to rework health policies on their own. “It was such a mistake to federalize so much of health care in the ACA,” said Verma,

In urging states to consider the changes, CMS is renaming a provision of the law, known as 1332, which until now has mainly been used to give states permission to create programs to ease the burden on insurers of high-cost customers. CMS is switching the name to “State Relief and Empowerment Waivers,” emphasizing the administration’s desire to hand off health-care policies to states.

Trump and HHS officials and Repug legislation and other greedbangers have been saying over and over and over that they are protecting those with pre-existing conditions, but innumerable analyses have pointed to loopholes that make that to be a lie.

[Hortensis]

5. Oh, dear. I should have followed that up. I know many

are working to make sure coverage continues, but just assumed she was among them. It is possible that, in worst case, interim answers will have to be provided to limited numbers fortunate to live in progressive and dutiful states.

Apologies.

[progree]

6. No problem 😍 n/t

[BigmanPigman]

3. The lost the midterms and this was a big reason why.

The GOP wants to kill and bankrupt us.