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December 14, 2016 at 11:55 AM
A health insurance lobbyist who served Republicans in the U.S. House says some components of the Affordable Care Act may survive.
Katie Allen, the executive director of the Washington-based Council for Affordable Health Coverage, gave that assessment in a slidedeck she prepared for the Health Insurance and Managed Care Committee.
The committee, part of the Kansas City, Missouri-based National Association of Insurance Commissioners, included the slidedeck in the packet for a session it held Sunday in Miami Beach, Florida, at the NAIC’s fall meeting.
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Allen’s group represents a number of clients interested in health policy, including drug manufacturers; Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna Inc.; Bloomfield, Connecticut-based Cigna Corp.; the Washington-based National Association of Health Underwriters; and the Washington-based National Association of Manufacturers.
Allen predicted that Republican policymakers will try to offer much stronger incentives for people to keep paying health insurance premiums even when they feel healthy; create special programs, or high risk pools, to serve people with health problems; and generally work to make insurance products and programs more flexible.
Allen, who served as a health care legislative assistant to Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, a medical doctor, from April 2014 through January 2015, and as a senior legislative assistant to Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., from January 2015 through November 2015, gave the NAIC a chart rating the chances of major ACA commercial health insurance provisions surviving.
She assigned the provisions a survival rating of low, medium or high.
Allen gave some version of the ACA health insurance premium subsidies, a revised version of the current restrictions on medical underwriting, and the provision requiring insurers to let parents keep children on their coverage up till age 26 a high chance of surviving.
