Campaign Action
This is inconvenient for the Trump administration. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, part of Tom Price's Department of Health and Human Services, mis out with its report on the health of the insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act for 2016, and it's pretty good.
The transitional reinsurance and permanent risk adjustment programs functioned smoothly for the 2016 benefit year, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act compliant market continued to grow. […]
The transitional reinsurance program continues to provide significant protection to individual market issuers with exceptionally high-cost enrollees. […]
Both the transitional reinsurance program and the permanent risk adjustment program are working as intended in compensating plans that enrolled higher-risk individuals, thereby protecting issuers against adverse selection within a market within a state and supporting them in offering products that serve all types of consumers.
Those are the top-level findings, all boiling down to the fact that the market is "working as intended" under the law. Timothy Jost, a professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and health care expert, points out at Health Affairs that the "data also would seem to refute the commonly held belief that the marketplace population is becoming sicker"—meaning the population in the Obamacare exchanges is a good mix of healthy and sick, and is sustainable. Meaning it's not in a death spiral.
If not for the out-and-out sabotage by the Trump administration and the uncertainty created by its dithering over payments to insurers (not to mention the chaos Congress has created), the market would be going into the 2018 plan year very strong. As it is, it finished out 2016 in very good shape, and the Trump administration just admitted it.
Senate Republicans are still talking Trumpcare, and plan to bring it back after the July 4th recess. We absolutely MUST make sure they don’t have the votes. Keep calling your Republican senators at (202) 224-3121. Tell them “NO DEAL” on Trumpcare. Then, tell us how it went.