In June 2018, President Trump’s administration announced – as part of a lawsuit known as Texas v. United States, brought by 20 Republican state attorneys general – it will no longer defend the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Senate Democrats are preparing a long-shot procedural maneuver to reverse new Trump administration regulations that they say would sabotage the Affordable Care Act by expanding “junk” insurance that isn’t obligated to cover preexisting conditions.
Rhode Island is kind of an interesting state this year. The smallest state geographically and one of the smallest population-wise, they only have two carriers offering individual market coverage: Blue Cross Blue Shield and Neighborhood Health Plan. Way back in May both carriers submitted their preliminary 2019 ACA policy rate increase requests, averaging around 9.7% overall. What's most noteworthy is that unlike most other states, both carriers are mostly blowing off 2018 ACA sabotage factors like mandate repeal and #ShortAssPlans. Blue Cross isn't adding anything to account for the negative risk pool impact, while Neighborhood (which holds slightly more than half of the market share) is only tacking on about 2% in response.
OK, a little more self-serving news...until last week I hadn't been interviewed, quoted or cited by other media outlets for awhile, but with both the #TexasFoldEm lawsuit, the Brent Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings and the 2019 Open Enrollment Period all coming up fast, I've had one of each of the above happen over the past week:
INTERVIEW: If you want to hear me flap my gums explaining the #TexasFoldEm lawsuit and the implications of it for 40 minutes or so, check out last week's special episode of Hopping Mad podcast with Arliss Bunny and Will McLeod:
The Big News this week is all about the #TexasFoldEm court case (which could potentially destroy the Affordable Care Act as soon as January 2019) and the Brent Kavanaugh SCOTUS confirmation hearings (which could potentially destroy both the Affordable Care Act and the rest of United States as soon as, oh, let's call it within a year or so).
I hope neither of these things happens, of course...but regardless of how things play out, I also hope to still be around to document, analyze and explain the latest healthcare policy drama as it happens for years to come.
ACASignups.net has been kept alive for nearly five years thanks to two main sources: Individual supporters who donate either once or monthly, and banner ads, which are usually generic. Today I'm honored to announce that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, one of the most respected sources for healthcare knowledge and education, has also agreed to advertise on this site.
Vice President Pence said Thursday that Republicans plan to give another try to repealing and replacing ObamaCare if they do well enough in November’s elections.
Pence made the remarks to reporters while in Wisconsin to campaign for GOP Senate candidate Leah Vukmir, saying that if she wins, it would help Republicans with their goal of eventually repealing the health-care law.
“We made an effort to fully repeal and replace ObamaCare and we'll continue, with Leah Vukmir in the Senate, we'll continue to go back to that,” Pence told reporters.
Back in April, I started an ambitious project which set out to track every legislative or regulatory measure taken by every state to counter, cancel out or mitigate sabotage of the Affordable Care Act by the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans. It resulted in this color-coded spreadsheet, which lists dozens of bills, proposals, amendments and so on at various stages of completion.
The bad news is that project has proven to be too large for me to keep up with--there's simply too many bills, too many stages and too much other stuff going on for me to keep track of it all.
Last year, Virginia residents experienced massive amounts of heartburn and ulcers as two major insurance carriers, Optima (Sentara Health) and Anthem (HealthKeepers) played musical chairs with both their 2018 rate filings and which areas of the state they offered plans on.
In May 2017, things didn't look too bad: Both Anthem and Optima were available in fairly large chunks of the state, and while Anthem wanted to raise rates an ugly 38% on average, Optima was only looking to increase rates by around 10-11%.
