Affordable Care Act
December 04, 2018
New insurance guidelines would undermine rules of the Affordable Care Act
Excerpts From the Washington Post
Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, issued new guidance to states that would allow weakening of provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
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 by people buying health plans in marketplaces created under the law.
According to advice issued Thursday by federal health officials, states should be free to redefine the use of those subsidies, which began in 2014. They represent the first help the government ever has offered middle-class consumers to afford monthly premiums for private insurance.
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. In an even more dramatic change, 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.
The ACA health plans have been the only ones for which consumers can use the subsidies, which are tax credits designed to help customers with incomes up to the middle class — 400 percent of the federal poverty line — afford the premiums.
The new advice, called “waiver concepts” because they are ideas for how states could get federal permission to deviate from the law’s basic rules, stray from those goals. Significantly, they would allow states to set different income limits for the subsidies — higher or lower than the federal one — and, if a state wanted, base the amount of help on a resident’s age, not income.
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.
Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, said the administration is using executive powers to let states “move in the direction that efforts [by congressional Republicans] to repeal and replace the law laid out last year.” He said some of the administration’s changes are even more profound than the failed efforts on Capitol Hill. For instance, a far-reaching amendment sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) would have let insurers offer health plans that fall short of ACA rules. But it would not have let ACA subsidies be used for such plans, as CMS is now encouraging.
Until now, they have focused on bending the ACA’s rules for health plans. The administration has rewritten regulations to make it easier for Americans to buy two types of insurance that are relatively inexpensive because they do not contain all the benefits and consumer protections that the ACA typically requires.
The new steps go further by undercutting the basic ACA structure of the individual insurance marketplaces created for those who cannot get affordable health benefits through a job.
Verma reiterated an administration talking point that insurance rates have escalated since the ACA was passed and that health-plan choices within ACA marketplaces have dwindled. However, the current ACA enrollment period, lasting until mid-December, is different from previous ones because prices for the most popular tier of coverage have stabilized in many places and more insurers are taking part in the marketplaces.