House Panel OKs Short-Term Health Blocker Bill

“In many cases, consumers purchasing short-term plans are not even aware of these risks because the Trump administration is allowing short-term plans to be sold alongside plans that comply with federal consumer protections,” Scott said at the hearing, which was streamed live on the web. “A recent survey shows that most consumers increasingly expect their health insurance to automatically reflect the ACA’s consumer protections.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the highest-ranking  Republican on the committee, questioned why the House Education and Labor Committee had any jurisdiction over the bill.

She and other Republicans on the committee said H.R. 1010 would reduce consumers’ choices, not protect them.

“House Democrats are reiterating that they favor one-size-fits-all federal mandates instead of respecting the judgment of state lawmakers and authorities to act in their state’s best interest,” Foxx said.

Rep. Gregorio Kilili Sablan, a Democrat who represents the Northern Mariana Islands in the House, was one of the few lawmakers at the hearing who talked about specific concerns about short-term health insurance, other than general concerns about short-term health insurance policies’ general failure to comply with the ACA essential health benefits package rules and benefits richness rules.

Sablan noted that, under the current rules, a short-term health insurance issuer could refuse to renew the coverage of an insured who had health problems, or rescind the coverage of a consumer who turned out to have an undisclosed pre-existing condition.

In that situation, a consumer might  be unable to get any health coverage until the next ACA individual major medical insurance open enrollment, Sablan said.

The individual major medical open enrollment period, or time of year when people can apply for individual major medical insurance without showing they have what the government classifies as a good reason to be shopping for coverage, now runs from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15.

Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., talked about some Democratic proposals for responding to the high cost of individual major medical insurance, as alternatives to encouraging consumers to hold down costs by buying non-ACA products.

Schrier said the alternatives including making ACA individual major medical premium tax credits available to people earning up to 600% of the federal poverty level, rather than 400%; capping what individuals and families have to pay for coverage at 8.5% of their income, rather than 9.86%; and letting consumers in areas with little commercial health insurance market competition buy into Medicaid.

Resources

Links to information about the H.R. 1010 markup, including a video of the meeting, are available here.

— Read Feds Unleash Short-Term Health Insurance From Obama-Era Limit, on ThinkAdvisor.

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