Here’s one for the ages. The President who accuses Republicans of trying to take away health care access is limiting your access to short-term health plans. This is part two of the great, “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” lie.
In 2018, the Trump Administration expanded plan offerings by removing unnecessary federal requirements around short-term health insurance. The idea is simple: if you need comprehensive long-term coverage, you get comprehensive long-term coverage. If you need short-term insurance – maybe you’re between plans or young and healthy – get short-term insurance. It’s grounded in the principle of choice.
Biden doesn’t like the concept of short-term coverage, and claims that he is protecting the consumer. But while he thinks he knows better than you, his policy ignores some really important facts:
We will have more uninsured people without these plans. Based on an average of projections from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary, the Congressional Budget Office, the Center for Health Economy, the Urban Institute, and the Commonwealth Fund, the current proposed changes to the 2018 rule will likely leave millions of Americans uninsured. In addition, the regulatory impact analysis concedes that spending will increase. So, we’re spending more money to insure fewer people? That’s backwards.
Effectively, this will eliminate a key protection for people with preexisting conditions. It would mean that a person who gets sick during the coverage period will lose insurance protection when that coverage period ends. Why? Biden’s proposal would destroy the current 1 year coverage timeframe by limiting the short-term insurance to 3 months with a single 1 month renewal. This would also impact a person that is unemployed for more than 3 months.
The current regulation offers coverage at lower premiums, and the Biden policy would increase premiums and cost to the taxpayer. The non-partisan U.S. CBO reports that these short-term plans often “have lower deductibles or wider provider networks than plans in the fully regulated nongroup market” at premiums “as much as 60 percent lower than premiums for the lowest-cost bronze plan.” Short-term plans strengthen the market.
Some individuals who lose short-term coverage will choose Affordable Care Act coverage instead, where they will face substantially higher premiums, narrower networks and higher cost-sharing. How do we know this? Last year 78% of premiums collected by insurers for their exchange plans came not from the people enrolled in the plan but from the federal government’s subsidies – a reflection of rising costs. Expect federal spending of your taxpayer dollars to go up.
Let me spell it out in simple terms. For 10 months out of the year, people cannot buy ACA plans, and the Biden Administration’s solution is to punish people that don’t purchase comprehensive coverage. Everyone has unique needs, and the last thing we should be doing is narrowing the number of plan options for all Americans. Let Americans choose what’s best for them.
