While President Trump continues to display remarkable volte-face on health reform, 18 million American’s are at risk of experiencing another increase in their premiums.
The fate of the bipartisan health bill that sought to fund necessary cost-sharing payments for the individual market has likely been sealed, at least in the short-term. It would be all but impossible for Republican lawmakers to support the deal – let alone bring it up for a vote – without the president’s or Speaker Ryan’s endorsement. After flip-flopping his stance on the bill, President Trump won’t commit to anything but full repeal out of spite for President Obama.
While the GOP remains steadfast on playing party politics, Democrats remain willing and cooperative to work on necessary reforms. Republican’s are tasked with supporting Trump’s agenda or caring for American’s that need their help. All the while Minnesota and the rest of the nation face ramifications of three weeks without reconciliation on the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
The following article was posted on the TrumpAccountable.org website October 19, 2017:
As President Trump’s position on the Alexander-Murray Obamacare stabilization plan whipsawed throughout the day on Tuesday, he started to use the term “bailout” more and more to describe the subsidies that help the neediest Americans afford health care.
To be clear: Providing funds for Americans who need health insurance is not a bailout of the insurance companies. It’s support for our aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters who need help with cancer treatment, pre-natal care, or surgery.
When the financial industry, fueled by greed and gross mismanagement, brought the U.S economy to the brink of a depression, the big banks needed a bailout. The bank bailout cost taxpayers an estimated 700 billion dollars. The banks made poor decisions (and lots of money) leading up to the crash and taxpayers bailed them out.
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump can call them bailouts, but the Obamacare subsidies are simply a way to help Americans pay for health insurance.
The following article by Rachel West, Katherine Gallagher Robbins and Melissa Boteach was posted on the Center for American Progress website October 16, 2017:
CREDIT: AP Photo/Susan Walsh
On the heels of their humiliating health care debacle, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are stepping up efforts to push a tax plan designed to benefit the wealthy. The plan makes vague and unspecific overtures when it comes to provisions that could benefit working- and middle-class taxpayers, but it is crystal clear about the benefits it would bestow on rich individuals and wealthy corporations.
For example, the plan removes taxes on extremely wealthy estates, slashes the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and abolishes the alternative minimum tax, which ensures that higher-income households—which are often able to take advantage of lucrative deductions and credits—contribute at least some modicum of taxes. It also gives a special low tax rate to owners of pass-through businesses, who are already able to avoid corporate taxes by instead paying personal tax rates on their portion of the businesses’ profits, allowing them a lower effective tax rate. All of these provisions would benefit the wealthiest Americans, including Trump himself.
The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website October 13, 2017:
President Trump on October 4, 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
This article has been updated.
Let’s set aside for the moment President Trump’s decision to end Obamacare’s cost-sharing reduction payments (CSRs) to insurers, a system under which insurers are subsidized to help keep costs low for low-income insurance recipients.
Let’s also set aside the other ways in which the Trump administration has been deliberately undermining enrollment in the Obamacare marketplaces. We’ll set aside that the administration has slashed funding to outreach programs by as much as 92 percent, ended partnerships with state groups aimed at getting people enrolled, cut funding for advertising the enrollment period and even decided it would shut down the enrollment website for 12 hours a week for maintenance. Continue reading “Trump’s not going to be able to avoid blame for kneecapping Obamacare”
The following article by Profession J.B. Silvers was posted on the Conversation website October 13, 2017:
Credit: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump has issued the first of what promises to be a series of health insurance executive orders aimed at dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
It instructs the government to essentially exempt small businesses and potentially individuals from some of the rules underpinning the landmark legislation known as “Obamacare,” following the GOP’s failureto get Congress to approve a plan to repeal and replace it.
These steps would free more employers to access bare-bones and short-term health insurance coverage and join together to bargain with insurers. It’s not clear how this order will change the U.S. health insurance market. But as a health finance professor and the former CEO of an insurance company, I’m confident it is more likely to compound many of Obamacare’s problems than to fix them.
In particular, many smaller employers have seen their costs rise dramatically since insurers were forced to price their plans based on the average of all claims in the small group market rather than the experience of each firm.
But there is a reason why Obamacare was designed this way. Employers with older and less healthy workers were almost shut out of the insurance market because insurers deemed them so costly to cover and wanted to avoid the risk. Companies with younger and healthier workers had a good deal previously, but many other employers did not.
The Affordable Care Act was supposed to solve this problem by lumping everyone together to even out rates. Making rates more reasonable for many Americans meant requiring some of us to pay more.
Market dynamics
The government’s attempt to keep President Barack Obama’s oft-repeated promise that “if you like your current plan, you can keep it” didn’t help. Employers with low-cost plans and healthier workforces chose to be grandfathered out of many new requirements, leaving a much less healthy – and more expensive to cover – pool for pricing everyone else’s insurance.
Nevertheless, the share of adults without health insurance fell to a record low of 10.9 percent in late 2016, from 18 percent before the health insurance exchanges opened in October 2013, as measured by polling by Gallup and Sharecare. (The uninsurance rate has ticked up to 11.7 percent since Trump took office.)
What would be a good way to get the remaining 28 million Americansinsured at a reasonable cost? It may seem obvious that letting small businesses without much purchasing power in the health insurance market band together will enable them to get the same deals as large self-insured companies – which get to choose among a variety of options.
In most markets, this kind of diversity and choice fosters the robust competition Trump says he wants to see. But in health insurance, this may lead to fragmentation and market failure.
That’s because as insurers scramble for ideal customers – those least likely to get sick – they drive higher-risk people away by charging them higher premiums and making them foot a bigger share of their medical bills. Unfortunately, the latter (people often with preexisting conditions and requiring long-term treatment) really need medical care and the insurance coverage required to get it.
Because of this, all but the largest of the association health plans that the executive order is supposed to encourage still will most likely exclude high-risk individuals and employers, just as they have in the past, as health law expert Tim Jost predicts.
How will the vulnerable get health care?
Trump said that his executive order will help “millions and millions of people.” But I believe it is more likely to drive coverage for many out of reach while benefiting the Americans whose insurance needs are relatively minimal.
One could argue that the government should never have tried to force healthier people to pay so much more for coverage to make it affordable for everyone else. Yet the nation needs a mechanism to help Americans with chronic and preexisting conditions pay for the medical care they need.
Establishing high-risk pools is one way to make this work, and they definitely can help as long as there is funding available. Unfortunately, most attempts to handle high-risk individuals this way have run out of money and left vulnerable patients high and dry. Trump’s approach does nothing to deal with this.
Any solution that makes health insurance more affordable across the board will need to be comprehensive. I believe Trump is instead embarking on a process that is both naïve and piecemeal based on wishful thinking regarding the power of markets to resolve all the problems with this difficult sector.
During his signing ceremony, he promised that the policies established by the order would “cost the government virtually nothing.” If that proves true, it is likely that we will receive exactly what we pay for.
The following column was written by State DFL Chair Ken Martin:
As Congress turns to tax reform, details surrounding the Republican tax plan remain blurry. But we know one thing for sure: The plan balances massive handouts for the wealthy on the backs of working Americans.
The Republican tax proposal is written by Wall Street, for Wall Street. Literally. President Donald Trump tapped two former Wall Street executives—Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn—to secretly craft a tax plan and force a partisan vote without the American people knowing how much they’ll be harmed. Continue reading “Republican Tax Plan is a Bad Deal for Working Families”
The following article was posted on the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy website October 4, 2017:
The “tax reform framework” released by the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders on September 27 would not benefit everyone in Minnesota equally. The richest one percent of Minnesota residents would receive 62.2 percent of the tax cuts within the state under the framework in 2018. These households are projected to have an income of at least $632,000 next year. The framework would provide them an average tax cut of $65,780 in 2018, which would increase their income by an average of 2.5 percent.
The following post by Matt O’Brien was posted on the Washington Post website October 6, 2017:
Credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
President Trump is trying to give Wall Street what it’s always wanted: tax cuts. But doing that might take away what it’s always had: the Republican Party.
That, you see, is a pretty good description of Trump’s tax plan. It would bestow almost all of its benefits on the Republican donors at the very top of the income ladder, and it would pay for some of this largesse by actually raising taxes on the Republican voters a couple of rungs below that. Indeed, by 2027, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that the top 1 percent would be receiving 79.7 percent of all the Trump tax cuts, while the 80th to 95th percentile of households would be getting negative 5 percent. Marxists might call this “heightening the contradictions” — making things worse for people so they’ll join the revolution. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) describes it as a plan whose “purpose” is to “help the middle class.” You say tomayto, I say tomahto. Continue reading “Trump’s tax plan gives Wall Street everything it wants — and that’s bad news for them”
The following article by Jonathan Martina and Alexander Burns was posted on the New York Times website October 5, 2017:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and other Republican leaders in Congress are facing pressure from all sides of their party leading up to next year’s midterm elections. Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Republican leaders in Congress are under attack from all sides of their own party, battered by voters from the right and left, spurned by frustrated donors and even threatened by the Trump White House for ineffective leadership and insufficient loyalty.
