Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Health Policy Perspectives: ACA Offers Chance For Congressional Partisans To Work Across The Aisle; KanCare's Low Ranking
Philadelphia Inquirer: Congress Must Offer Bipartisan Prescription For Health-Care Reform
The repeated inability of the GOP to move forward legislation repealing the ACA should be viewed by both sides as an opportunity to do what most Americans are clamoring for us to do: work together to fix the parts of the ACA that need to be fixed, while preserving the parts that need to be preserved. We should start by stabilizing the exchanges in all 50 states so that health insurers will reenter these markets, creating a competitive environment that will drive down premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. (Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), 8/22)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Threat To Affordable Care Act Remains Alive And Expensive
The Congressional Budget Office, whose estimates of the disastrous impact of various Republican health care bills did so much to sink them, reported this month on the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s Plan B for getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. The prognosis isn’t good, mainly because the goal has become simply to sabotage Obamacare without coming up with something better to replace it. (8/24)
The Washington Post: The Disgraceful Way Trump Walks In Obama’s Footsteps
Congress is nimble at evading responsibilities but cannot avoid deciding either to repudiate or to tolerate a residue of President Barack Obama’s lawlessness, one that most, perhaps all, congressional Democrats and many, perhaps most, Republicans want Obama’s successor to continue. ... The subsidy that Congress must confront in September is the ACA requirement that the secretary of health and human services devise a program to compensate insurers for the cost of selling discounted plans to some low-income purchasers. (George F. Will, 8/23)
Kansas City Star: J.D. Power Survey Ranking KanCare Last Was Flawed, But So Is The Program
You have to wonder how the consumer ratings company J.D. Power, which has now backed away from a report that originally said KanCare ranked dead last among 36 privatized state Medicaid programs, ever thought that interviewing just 10 of the 400,000 people on KanCare might provide a statistically significant picture of how well the program works. (8/23)
