On Obama’s Neoliberal Heritage Foundation Bailout of the Health Insurance Industry
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Two good recent pieces by Sarah Kliff. First, on the importance of eliminating lifetime spending caps:
Six months before Timmy was born, President Barack Obama signed a sweeping health care law that would come to bear his name. Six days before Timmy’s birth, the Obama administration began to phase in a provision that banned insurance companies from limiting how much they would pay for any individual’s medical bills over his or her lifetime. At the time the Affordable Care Act passed, 91 million Americans had employer-sponsored plans that imposed those so-called lifetime limits.
That group included Timmy’s parents, whose plan previously included a $1 million lifetime limit. This Obamacare provision took effect September 23, 2010. Timmy was born September 29. On December 17, he surpassed $1 million worth of bills in the neonatal intensive care unit. He didn’t leave the NICU until he was 5 months old.
If Timmy had been born a week earlier, his medical benefits could have run out while he was still in the NICU. But that didn’t happen. His insurer covered everything. The NICU bills his parents save total just over $2 million (they come out to $2,070,146.94, to be exact).
“He would have lost his insurance at a million dollars,” his mom, Michelle Morrison, estimates, “which would have been about [halfway through] the NICU stay.”
Second, on the importance of the ACA to career freedom:
I spend a lot of time talking to Obamacare enrollees like Hoover: people who struck out on their own — left a job, started a business, went back to school — after Obamacare. They felt empowered to do this because in the reformed individual market, insurers had to offer everyone coverage — and couldn’t charge sick people more.
And now, many of them are already beginning to rearrange their lives around the law’s uncertain future.
There were 1.4 million self-employed people who relied on the marketplaces for coverage in 2014, recent research from the Treasury Department shows. That works out to one-fifth of all marketplace enrollees being people who work for themselves.
The Medicaid expansion is the most important part of the ACA, but the regulations that make insurance better and more accessible are also extremely important.
On balance, the Trump administration was the worst case scenario for a Republican presidency. But in this particular but critical issue, a Rubio or Cruz administration would be even worse. The always-imploding Trump administration does make it more likely that the most important liberal (not “neo”) legislation since the Johnson administration will survive.