Republican senators railed against Obamacare’s high premiums in a closed-door meeting Thursday but haven’t reached a consensus on the best path to lower them.
The 14-member healthcare working group met briefly Thursday to discuss Obamacare’s insurance regulations, including protections for pre-existing conditions and essential health benefits. It was the second time the working group has met during Republican senators’ nascent effort to draft their own Obamacare repeal bill a week after the House passed its own version.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told reporters that the lawmakers discussed the latest headlines of double-digit premium requests in a few states and “market distortions” such as insurers fleeing the markets. A day before the meeting, insurance giant Aetna said it would pull out of the last remaining Obamacare exchanges it offers plans in.
Talk centered on “what we need to do to stabilize the insurance market short-term and what we can do long-term,” Johnson said without elaborating. “We’ve got a group of 52 Republican senators and all of us want to get to yes. It is hard, complex and I am not going to be able to answer all of your questions today.”
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., pointed reporters to a newspaper article of Aetna’s withdrawal.
“You saw this headline? Aetna pulled out again,” he said.
While senators were more willing to talk about their concerns about Obamacare, there was no consensus on the way to reduce premiums.
Some ideas bandied about included long-standing GOP ideas such as letting insurers sell plans across state lines and expanding health savings accounts.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said senators haven’t put together any discussion drafts or legislative text.
“Right now there are all discussions,” he said.
But whatever the Senate puts out is — likely to be different from the House bill.
“We’re really not looking at the House bill at this point,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the second-ranking GOP senator. “We are coming up with our own ideas of what we think makes sense.”
The House favored an approach that would let states opt out of key insurance requirements such as covering essential health benefits and not charging people with pre-existing conditions more money.
Some senators in the working group touted certain aspects of the House plan, including the option of turning to risk pools to help cover costs of people with pre-existing conditions.
“The Maine model shows you can cover pre-existing conditions without even repealing guaranteed issue,” said Johnson, referring to Maine’s high-risk pool, which requires insurers to contribute.
A high-risk pool subsidizes the cost of covering someone who is too sick to get insurance coverage. More than 30 states adopted high-risk pools before Obamacare’s mandate that insurers cover everyone with pre-existing conditions.
But Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told the GOP conference in a lunch this week that they had better be ready to pony up more money. She said that to fully fund risk pools such as Maine’s, $15 billion a year would be needed, more than the House bill allotted.
Thune hinted, though, that the Senate could be willing to devote more to money to risk pools.
“We will aspire to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions are covered and that high-risk pools have more resources to make that happen,” he said.
