House Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows hinted that he is open to more funding to help people with pre-existing conditions after a new estimate of the House legislation to repeal Obamacare shed doubts on whether sick people would be shielded from high premiums.
The North Carolina Republican said he would look at the updated score from the Congressional Budget Office for the American Health Care Act, which would gut Obamacare. He told reporters he wasn’t averse to more funding if it is needed.
“The president is committed to making sure pre-existing conditions are covered in principle and in practice, which means that funding has to be there to make it work,” Meadows said Wednesday. “One of the critical things that we are going to make sure of is there is the appropriate funding to do that.”
The CBO released an updated score for the American Health Care Act on Wednesday afternoon, stating that a last-minute amendment from Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., could make healthcare coverage unaffordable for some sick people.
The amendment, which drew the Freedom Caucus’s support for the bill, would let states opt out of an Obamacare requirement that insurers cover 10 essential health benefits. States also could opt out of community rating, a measure that prevents insurers from charging sicker people more money.
The CBO expected that healthy people who live in a state that got a waiver for community rating would be able to buy insurance with relatively low premiums.
However, premiums would rise over time for people who are less healthy, including those with a pre-existing or newly acquired medical condition. Those people would “ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.”
The budget office further said that the instability would cause some people who would have been insured under Obamacare to lose insurance.
Meadows pointed to federal high-risk pools to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions such as cancer or diabetes get affordable coverage. Under a high-risk pool, the government subsidizes the cost of a sick person’s insurance.
But the CBO said that the additional funding included in the legislation for high-risk pools wasn’t enough. The bill has $23 billion for the pools and allows states to use the money that is left over from a $115 billion stability fund to prop up individual insurance markets.
Meadows countered that the federal high-risk pools are based on a model in Maine in which insurers partially contribute to the pools.
However, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has said that much more money is needed for the pools. She said that to do what Maine did nationally, $15 billion a year would be needed, which is far above the amounts in the current legislation.
Meadows said that he wasn’t averse to adding more funds for helping people with pre-existing conditions and driving down premiums, but didn’t say how much.
The bill has to reduce deficits by about $1 billion in the two Senate panels that are reviewing it. That’s because the GOP is using a path called reconciliation that lets a bill be approved in the Senate with only 51 votes, but the bill must reduce a certain amount of the deficit and only focus on budget and spending levels.
“In the end what we’ve gotta do is make sure there is enough funds there to handle pre-existing conditions and drive down premiums,” Meadows said. “If we can’t do those three things then we will have failed.”
Meadows got emotional when he said that he lost his sister to breast cancer and father to lung cancer.
“I am not going to make a political decision today that affects somebody’s sister or father because I wouldn’t do it to myself,” he said. “I tell you in the most earnest of ways that we are going to get this right.”
