FOR MONTHS, health-care experts have been warily watching the Department of Health and Human Services, waiting to see whether the Trump administration would accelerate its reckless campaign to dismantle Obamacare. Last week, they got their answer: The department proposed a disastrous rule that would promote even more turmoil in health insurance markets and harm some extremely vulnerable people.
The department’s plan would allow insurance companies to sell virtually unregulated health policies. This would signal a return to the bad old days when insurers could sharply limit benefits, impose caps on coverage and discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. Obamacare was designed to eliminate the sale of junk health insurance plans that disappear when people need them. But its major reforms did not extend to short-term plans, which are meant for people between jobs and can currently run for only up to three months. So the Trump administration is telling insurers that “short- term” plans can now run up to 364 days.
It’s true that the marketplaces Obamacare established would persist, and participating insurers could still sell only comprehensive plans on them. But insurers would lure young and healthy people toward cheap, unregulated short-term plans, leaving sicker, older enrollees in marketplace-compliant plans. The young and healthy could wait to get sick, then jump back into marketplace-compliant plans when they needed expensive care. With fewer healthy people paying in, insurers would have to hike premiums for marketplace-compliant plans — if they decided to continue offering them at all.
