Maryland lawmakers set to do what Congress can’t: protect Obamacare with tax on insurers
Given the stakes -- 150,000 Marylanders potentially losing health insurance in an election year -- lawmakers in the
And Republican Gov.
"We have people paying more for their health insurance than they're paying for their mortgage for their house," Hogan said in his first public comments about the reinsurance plan. "They're making choices between buying groceries and having health insurance. It shouldn't be that way."
The plan, which still needs final approval in the Assembly, would impose a new, one-year state tax on insurance companies and uses that revenue to subsidize the most expensive health insurance claims from policies sold through the state's health benefit exchange. By lowering the risk to insurers selling on the individual market, state leaders hope to lower premiums enough to make them affordable next year.
If lawmakers did nothing, they said, the individual market had the potential to collapse weeks before the
"It could have been more catastrophic than that, as if that wasn't bad enough," Hogan said.
The one-year-fix is designed to help stave off premium increases that are projected to rise as much as 50 percent for the second year in a row. The
Republican and Democratic leaders say their plan to prevent the collapse of the individual market -- and the ripple effects it would have throughout the state's healthcare industry -- was the most crucial and complex legislation of this four year term. Similar versions of the plan have passed each chamber.
Hogan,
The three men, who often spar politically, said this was so important that they agreed to avoid public and partisan battles over how to do it.
"Everybody understands the severity of it," said Busch, an
All three blamed federal policy makers for not shoring up health care and for enacting policies that destabilized the market.
"This is a crisis, and it's not of our doing," said Miller, a
Hogan designated a negotiating team to work with a group of Democratic leaders, who set up a panel of experts in 2017 to start studying options to keep Obamacare afloat. And Hogan promised not to publicly debate the issue in the media, ensuring the quiet progress the measure has enjoyed.
"We said, 'We're not going to go have a press conference,'" Hogan recalled. "We're not going to be talking about this in public. We want to meet the entire session, and if we do nothing else, we need to come up with a solution to this. And do you agree? Can we call a truce? Can we not play politics like
Health insurance companies had been paying a 2.75 percent tax to the federal government, state analysts said, but will not have to pay it next year under tax cuts passed by
The cost of group plans -- those purchased through employers -- have risen by no more than 3.3 percent a year in
Without state intervention, health insurance premiums will rise by so much next year that only
That could possibly prompt the lone insurance company selling statewide policies on the exchange -- CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield -- to drop out of the market entirely, Redmer said.
"In my opinion, that would have been the impetus for the Affordable Care Act in
Several other states have also moved to create their own reinsurance programs to try to drive down insurance costs, including
State leaders hope that the new
A commission established by the
"This is putting a tourniquet on the bleeding," Eberle said. "It's not going to fix it entirely."
Last summer, the two insurers that offered coverage on the exchange told state regulators they had lost a combined
Health insurance companies have blamed rising premiums on the uncertainty in
Political analysts say rising health care costs are a politically potent issue in the upcoming 2018 election, particularly for
"It'd be hard to overstate the level of emotion and anxiety that voters have," said
Raabe said his firm anticipated it would take six minutes per person to conduct a recent survey about health insurance policies. Instead, respondents were so fired up about the issue that the conversations averaged 12 minutes a piece.
"
"If you combine the anxiety about the health care issue with the dissatisfaction about the federal tax giveaway, it creates a perfect storm... I think people saw an opportunity to address them both," Raabe said.
House Minority leader
"Never in my life in public office have people been coming into my office every day and saying, 'You need to help me with my rising insurance costs. I just can't do this,'" Kipke said. "They're begging for help."
Yet Kipke was among the 47
"The bottom line is we need a lot of money to really bring down rates," he said.
Del.
Proposals to create a state-level insurance mandate that could help buy healthcare policies for the uninsured were removed from the plan to make it more politically palatable.
"We decided to strip it and just leave what we could build consensus around," Pena-Melnyk said. "Sometimes you have to do that to get a bill through, and this is an emergency.
"The fact is, we cannot afford to do nothing," she added. Leaving "people in that individual market without insurance will affect all the hospitals."
But since the recent upheaval to Obamacare under
"It would be a choice for me between breathing and buying groceries or paying taxes," Gruber said.
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