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Trump doesn't really need Obamacare repeal, not when he has so much power to destroy it from the inside. He's doing that with a vengeance ahead of this year's open enrollment, set to begin November 1 and run through mid-December, already a shortened enrollment period. The administration has informed Mississippi that it will not be participating in enrollment preparation events in the region. Every year before enrollments began, Obama administration officials would go to the states and meet with groups that sign people up. That's a thing of the past reports Vox's Dylan Scott.
Up until Monday, Roy Mitchell, executive director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, thought these events were going forward in the coming weeks as planned. He had even asked HHS just last week for biographies of the officials they’d be sending.
But then two days ago, he received a short message from an agency official, which Mitchell shared with Vox: HHS wouldn’t be doing any Obamacare marketplace events in the South this year. No further explanation was provided.
"HHS bailing out was the last straw for us," Mitchell told me by phone Wednesday. "It's clearly sabotage." […]
HHS's abrupt withdrawal from the events is part of a bigger story. The Trump administration has already cut this year's open enrollment period in half. It slashed spending on advertising by 90 percent. Funding for the navigators program, which went to groups that helped people sign up for insurance, was reduced by 40 percent and then allowed to lapse entirely.
That's just what's happening around enrollments. Trump's ongoing threats to end cost-sharing reduction payments, federal government reimbursements to insurance companies for subsidizing costs to lower-income customers as required by the law, is creating havoc for the insurers. The uncertainty is causing insurers to leave the markets altogether, and to jack up premiums to compensate for what they assume will be the end of those CSR payments.
What that means is a 45 percent increase in premiums in Florida, for example. More than 1 million of the 1.43 million Floridians with an ACA plan in 2017 received those CSR subsidies from insurers. That's a major financial commitment on the part of insurers, again required by law, to make healthcare affordable.
With Trump continuing to insist that repeal is going to happen, and working hard to sabotage the law at every possible turn in the meantime, expect those kinds of premium hikes around the country. Most Obamacare enrollees won't feel the brunt of those increases—somewhere around 80 percent of them have incomes that qualify them for premium subsidies from the federal government. So it will be all of us—the taxpayers—who pay those costs in the long run.
And all the blame for that is going to be on Trump.