06 August, 2017
That three-year-old challenge could determine the fate of those subsidies.
These payments help offset costs for insurers to provide low out-of-pocket costs for poorer Americans.
Kevin Counihan, who spent two years running Healthcare.gov for the Obama administration, has joined Centene, a health insurer betting big on Obamacare future. In a tweet on Wednesday, Levitt noted that insurers would necessarily have to raise premiums to cover the costs of the policies.
Responding to Saturday's tweet, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said that if the president carried out that threat, "every expert agrees that [insurance] premiums will go up and health care will be more expensive for millions of Americans".
Republican legislators have become more vocal in advocating for CSR payments. Trump has speculated that he could force Democrats to make a deal on health care by stopping the payments. They have to set premiums for an entire year within the next month or so. Those tax credits were not part of the suit. Today, seven years later, most would vote against it as well, especially in light of its history of rate increases and higher deductibles, although President Barack Obama promised otherwise.
CSRs aren't the only area in which the Trump administration could create havoc in order to fulfill the president's promise of Obamacare's downfall.
The Trump administration is waiting to hear from lawyers about how they could stop the subsidies and what legal consequences they could face if they do so, administration officials told Politico.
Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said the decision was a "big deal" because it makes it hard for the Trump administration to settle the case.
Many insurers are already asking for hefty premium hikes amid the uncertainty over the cost-sharing subsidies and the Republicans' desire to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. The payments are now appropriated by the executive branch, but they became the subject of a lawsuit between the Republican-controlled House and the Obama administration. The 90-day extension that the court granted is due to expire on August 21, and Trump is also threatening to drop the case. In addition to the insurers' September 27 deadline, the next CSR payment is due on Aug. 21, so "if the administration intends not to make the August payment, it must announce its decision soon", wrote Timothy Jost, JD, professor of law emeritus at Washington & Lee University, in Lexington, Va., in a blog post for Health Affairs.
The Trump administration is making its decisions "month by month", but insurance plans don't have that luxury. That could leave millions of Americans without any options for subsidized coverage in the individual market.
Rewire is a non-profit independent media publication. Although he didn't specify what he meant by greater flexibility, some Senate Republicans have urged that insurers be allowed to issue policies that do not cover all of the "essential health benefits" required under the ACA, as well as policies that charge older enrollees higher premiums than now permitted. But somewhat higher-income consumers - a household of three making more than $85,000, for example - could be directly exposed to new ACA sticker shock.
Jeff Stelnik, senior vice president of strategy, sales, and marketing at BCBS Arizona told azcentral.com that premiums for benchmark silver-level plans would increase by 16% in 2018 compared to the year before. The first misconception is about how many people would "lose" their health insurance under the Republican legislation.
Nonetheless, the payments remain under a cloud because of a disagreement over whether they were properly approved in the health law, by providing an "appropriation".
Almost 6 million enrollees, or 57%, qualify for the cost-sharing payments this year, according to the most recent data from the Department of Health & Human Services.
