A key House lawmaker criticized the Trump administration’s decision to pay insurers this month for reducing out-of-pocket costs for low-income Obamacare customers.
But a Republican senator tasked with spearheading a bipartisan deal to fund the payments in 2018 praised the decision.
The dueling statements show the difficulties that lie ahead for reaching a bipartisan agreement by the end of September to fund the payments for all of next year.
Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, which has 170 members, called the payments unconstitutional Wednesday.
“We cannot dig our hands into a hole $20 trillion deep to bail out insurance companies,” he said. “Even worse, we will be adding insult to injury by masking the failures of Obamacare at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.”
The Trump administration decided Wednesday to make cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers for August. The payments reimburse insurers for reducing co-pays and deductibles for poor people enrolled in Obamacare.
The Trump administration has not made a decision on whether to continue the payments in 2018, which has led some Obamacare insurers to raise prices for next year.
Walker called the payments unconstitutional, a nod to a lawsuit filed by House Republicans in 2014. The lawsuit charged that the payments require a congressional appropriation, which the Obama administration did not do. A federal judge sided with the House but stayed her ruling until after the presidential election. The Trump White House has not decided what it wants to do about the payments.
But Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee who is spearheading the Senate’s efforts to continue the payments alongside Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the committee, praised the payments.
“State insurance commissioners have warned that abrupt cancellation of cost-sharing subsidies would cause premiums, co-pays and deductibles to increase and more insurance companies to leave the markets in 2018,” he said. “Congress now should pass balanced, bipartisan, limited legislation in September that will fund cost-sharing payments for 2018.”
Alexander has previously said he wants to reach a bipartisan deal to fund the payments by the end of September. However, it is not clear if there will be enough Republican support, especially as House Republicans want to try again to repeal Obamacare after an effort died in the Senate late last month.
The House Freedom Caucus filed a petition to bring to the House floor a clean repeal of Obamacare that would repeal the law but leave it in place for two years until a replacement is created.
