Administration of High Risk Pools
Administration of High Risk Pools

In a move that should provide some help to relatively few additional Americans the HHS is making changes to the high risk pools created by the Affordable Care Act. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will have its premiums reduced and eligibility restrictions loosened. From the Huffington Post:

To boost enrollment, Sebelius said monthly premiums, which vary by age and region, will drop in 17 of the states where HHS runs the program starting in July. In Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, premiums will plummet by 40 percent. Come July, people older than 55 who enroll in the Virginia PCIP’s standard plan will have to pay $297 a month, a steep drop from the current $498 monthly premium.

Sebelius also said PCIP applicants will no longer have to brandish rejection letters from insurance companies to prove they have pre-existing conditions. Instead, a doctor’s note will suffice.

Currently PCIP only provides insurance to roughly 18,000 people. This move should help modestly boast the number getting insurance through the program but the HHS will probably still need to maintain a difficult balancing act to prevent too many more people from signing up.

The ACA only provide $5 billion in funding for the high risk pools, which according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be insufficient to keep the program going until 2014, if total national enrollment reaches even the low six figures (PDF). Given the both the current anti-spending and anti-Obamacare mood in the House of Representatives, it is safe to assume Congress is unlikely to appropriated any more money to the program if it ran out of funds early.

The Boston Globe the have an interesting piece about how Massachusetts’ health care reform law came into being and the role Mitt Romney played in assure it’s passage. It is well worth a read. The article shows what a prominent role Romney played personally in making sure a individual mandate was part of the final legislation and why it would be impossible for him now to fully renounce the one in the Massachusetts’ law he signed. From the Boston Globe:

Romney’s grasp of the subject was “unbelievably impressive,’’ he said, and the governor warmed to the game-changing potential of the individual mandate. Romney’s political advisers, however, “were not that keen on it,’’ [Jonathan] Gruber said.

To them, the political hazards spoke louder than the policy-making opportunity.

The key players in the Massachusetts debate know what a critical champion Romney was of the individual mandate; so a total flip flop on the issue would be too deeply cynical as to be politically unfeasible

The article again made it clear how many of the most important components of the Massachusetts law, which also eventually made it into the Affordable Care Act, were only a few years ago seen as deep conservative policies advanced by right wing think tanks.

The House Republican leadership is planning to bring up for a vote a “clean bill” to raise the government’s borrowing limit. The House leadership intends for this vote to fail in order to prove the debt ceiling bill can’t pass without reaching some agreement on major cuts in spending. Of course, to “prove” this, Speaker [...]

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Getting waivers from HHS is going to be an important part of any state plan to implement their own single payer system.  And President Obama has already expressed his support for allowing states to begin receiving waivers from the ACA in 2014 rather than 2017.   That’s why FDL is joining with PNHP to ask both the President and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius to commit to granting Vermont the waivers it needs to make Green Mountain Care the best program it can possibly be for the people of Vermont.

You can sign the petition here.

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In Libya, NATO is insistent on deposing Muammar Gaddafi, but their rebel allies are simply not up to the job. Gaddafi’s forces are better armed and better trained. On the other hand, NATO and the United States don’t want to deploy the ground forces that deposing Gaddafi would normally require, so what is happening is [...]