Trump signs executive order to scale back Obamacare insurance rules

Breaking news on healthcare

Chicago Tribune Reporting

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-trump-health-care-executive-order-20171012-story.html

by Amy Goldstein
The Washington Post
Text summary below (Chicago Tribune).  Click link above for full article.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday morning intended to allow small businesses and potentially individuals to buy a long-disputed type of health insurance that skirts state regulations and Affordable Care Act protections.The White House and allies portray the president’s move to expand access to “association health plans” as wielding administrative powers to accomplish what congressional Republicans have failed to achieve: tearing down the law’s insurance marketplaces and letting some Americans buy skimpier coverage at lower prices. The order is Trump’s biggest step to carry out a broad but ill-defined directive he issued his first night in office for agencies to lessen ACA regulations from the Obama administration.Critics, who include state insurance commissioners, most of the health-insurance industry and mainstream policy specialists, predict that a proliferation of such health plans will have damaging ripple effects: driving up costs for consumers with serious medical conditions and prompting more insurers to flee the law’s marketplaces. Part of Trump’s actions, they say, will spark court challenges over their legality.

According to White House and agency officials, , the most far-reaching element of the multi-prong order instructs a trio of Cabinet departments to rewrite federal rules for association health plans – a type of insurance in which small businesses of a similar type band together through an association to negotiate benefits like getting monthly pay stubs.

The order will expand the availability of short-term insurance policies, which offer limited benefits meant as a bridge for people between jobs or young adults no longer eligible for their parents’ health plans. The Obama administration ruled that short-term insurance may not last for more than three months; Trump will extend that to nearly a year.

In addition, Trump’s action is intended to widen employers’ ability to use pretax dollars in “health reimbursement arrangements” to help workers pay for any medical expenses, not just for health policies that meet ACA rules – another reversal of Obama policy.

Other aspects of the order are less specific: commissioning a study, to be led by federal health officials, of ways to limit consolidation within the insurance and hospital industries; and directing agencies to find additional means to increase competition and choice in health care to improve its quality and lower its cost.

Briefing reporters on Thursday morning, Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, made clear that the president’s order is merely the “beginning” of actions the administration intends to take unilaterally to help “Obamacare’s victims.”

In one sense, the executive order fulfills a quest by conservative Republicans, especially in the House, who have unsuccessfully sought for more than two decades to expand the availability of association health plans, allowing them to be sold, unregulated, across state lines.

As details of what was forthcoming spread in Washington in recent days, health policy experts in think tanks, academia and the health-care industry emphasized that the order’s final language – and the ensuing fine print from agencies’ rules – will determine whether the impact will be as sweeping or quick as Trump has boasted.

“It’s going to cover a lot of territory and a lot of people, millions of people,” the president said two weeks ago. On Tuesday, he added: “It will be great, great health care for many, many people.”