The Alliance of Community Health Plans is “very concerned” about the uncertainty and instability in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces that is likely to follow a repeal of the healthcare reform law, the group’s CEO said recently.
A partial ACA repeal that President Barack Obama vetoed last year—considered to be a “legislative test drive” for what the GOP could do early in 2017—was particularly worrying since it eliminated the law’s subsidies and Medicaid expansion, ACHP CEO Ceci Connolly said in an interview with Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson.
“The conversations that we’re trying to have with policymakers right now is, OK, let’s take a look at other ways that you can make insurance affordable enough so that you still have those tens of millions of Americans covered,” she said.
To accomplish that, health plans, providers, patients and other stakeholders need a sufficient amount of time in order to “work through what would be a good set of alternatives” to the ACA, she said.
Are there ways to make health insurance more affordable? Absolutely. @CeciConnolly on @hereandnow https://t.co/aV5cx5MkZR
— ACHP (@_ACHP) December 14, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump has said he’d like to keep some of the more popular provisions of the ACA, such as a ban on denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, though some have pointed out that isn’t workable without something akin to an individual mandate.
Leading trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, meanwhile, has suggested replacing the individual mandate with other incentives to get covered, such as late enrollment penalties and waiting periods.
To Connolly, that speaks to why crafting an ACA alternative will be such a complicated task. No single provision is a “silver bullet” to make the law’s marketplaces work, she noted, adding, “it’s really assembling that jigsaw puzzle in a way that all of the pieces come together and kind of link up.”
Some Democratic senators, meanwhile, have indicated they may be willing to work with Republicans on crafting an ACA replacement that doesn’t diverge too much from the original law, Politico reports.
“If it makes sense, I think there’ll be a lot of Democrats who would be for it,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).