After witnessing repeated healthcare reform failures at the legislative level, President Trump took matters into his own hands last week by issuing an executive order. His order brings back patient choice and could lower healthcare costs for patients. Congress should work to make these and other pro-consumer choice healthcare policies permanent.
Trump’s executive order mostly helps the biggest victims of Obamacare: small business owners, their employees, and the millions of individuals who earn just enough not to be eligible for exchange subsidies.
Before Obamacare, one-half of small business employees had employer health coverage. Today, that number has fallen to one-third. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, average healthcare premiums have doubled under Obamacare. They’re expected to rise another 15 percent during this year’s open enrollment period due to factors that were already in place before Trump’s action.
The executive order calls for the expansion of Association Health Plans, which allow small businesses and other groups to band together across state lines to increase their pricing power to the same level as big nationwide employers. In Washington State, where AHPs have fought Obamacare regulations to an uneasy stalemate, over 60 AHPs exist, covering more than 500,000 residents.
The order also eliminates restrictions on short-term health plans, which aren’t required to cover Obamacare’s Essential Health Benefits like drug rehab, maternity care, and obesity screenings — benefits many Americans would forgo if they had the choice. This move reduces costs to about one-third of competing Obamacare plans. President Obama restricted these plans to only 90-days in spite of (or perhaps because of) their high consumer demand.
These plans could provide coverage options for the roughly 20 million Americans who chose not to purchase insurance because it was too expensive or they didn’t need it, facing a fine of up to 2.5 percent of their income. They would also put some money back into the pockets of the tens of millions of other hardworking Americans who are forced to pay way too much for coverage they don’t want or need.
Yet these beneficial reforms could be short-lived. The next Democratic president — say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — could simply issue an executive order reversing them.
To make these and other patient-centric reforms more lasting, Republicans must dive back into the legislative pool, where they have already twice drowned. The new path forward must be a bill that preserves Obamacare (for those who want it), but legalizes alternatives. Call it “pro-choice” healthcare legislation if you like, and commandeer the term from the Left.
Under such a reform, patients would have the ability to escape Obamacare and choose the doctors, insurance, and networks that work best for them — all of which was originally promised by President Obama and the then-Democrat majority when they sold Obamacare. And, for those who like their Obamacare, well, they could keep their Obamacare.
Many Democrats, such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., would still oppose such pro-choice legislation. As millions of insurance customers flocked to the new, cheaper plans, it would starkly demonstrate the unpopularity of Obamacare. But for now, Republicans don’t need Democratic support to pass such a law under budget reconciliation rules. They just need public support. Which is what a pro-choice healthcare proposal would generate.
Such legislation can also be a political cudgel for Republicans. They can point to Democratic intransigence as merely a political ploy to maintain an election year scare tactic. After all, the GOP-led Congress would be meeting the Democrats’ demands to preserve Obamacare, and still the Democrats will likely say “no.”
Meanwhile, Republicans can demonstrate that elusive ability to govern and deliver on a promise to fix Obamacare for their voters. But the biggest winners of pro-choice healthcare legislation would be the tens of millions of Obamacare victims who continue to suffer nearly a year after the law’s namesake left office.
Dr. Joel Strom DDS MS is a Fellow at the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions.
