Browse by Media Hit and Health Care

The state exemption from the community rating mandate is critical to stabilizing the marketplace, said Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at IPI. "I think it allows states to opt out and create a functioning health insurance market. They are allowing waivers so insurers can risk-rate patients and assess actuarially accurate fair premiums. If they are above the standard (premium rate) they can go into the risk pool."

While those groups said the latest bill goes in the wrong direction, others spoke out in support of the changes. The Independent Women's Voice called it a step in the right direction, as did the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Californians, you've been warned. 

With no new healthcare law in place or in sight, President Trump's efforts to recast healthcare reform are in the hands of Tom Price and Seema Verma.

Although legislative efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act have stalled, the Trump administration can make regulatory modifications to the health care reform law to keep insurance companies in the individual exchanges and strengthen the markets, observers said.

As Institute for Policy Innovation scholar Merrill Matthews recently noted in these pages, a number of states have tried to impose single-payer health plans on their citizens and failed.

The GOP plan could just repeat the same ACA mistakes, said IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews. "Instead of letting health insurers do what insurers do underwrite Republicans are retaining Obamacare's guaranteed issue provision."

Leaders on the Hill, in industry and some in public health praised Trump's pick of Gottlieb — a former FDA and CMS official, who's also a physician and a prominent health policy commentator — to run the agency. "The reason I voted through my objections with Trump is that a presidential election selects a team, not one person," said Tom Giovanetti, head of the conservative Institute of Policy Innovation. "Scott Gottlieb is another example."

"In the past week or two, Republicans apparently abandoned actuarial principles — just as Obamacare did," said the Institute for Policy Innovation's Merrill Matthews. "So Democrats included the mandate to have health insurance to keep people from gaming the system. However, it didn't work because the penalties were fairly low."

Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at right-leaning think tank the Institute for Policy Innovation, expressed skepticism at the notion that "getting rid of state lines," as Trump puts it, is effective.