Kasich, Brown hail CBO score on bipartisan fix
WASHINGTON — Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown urged passage of a U.S. Senate health-care compromise after a new report concluded it would trim the federal deficit by $3.8 billion during the next decade while not increasing the number of Americans without health insurance.
The report, released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, is likely to boost efforts by Senate Democrats and Republicans to pass a compromise brokered by Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.
“The Congressional Budget Office says that we can actually reduce the deficit modestly but also not have anybody removed from health under AlexanderMurray,” Kasich said in a video posted on Twitter. “It is a great thing to be for — stabilize our markets, save people’s health care, and move on to controlling health-care costs.”
Brown agreed with Kasich, saying, “Democrats and Republicans need to work together to pass this bipartisan plan that will control costs for Ohio families and reduce the deficit.”
Emily Benavides, a spokeswoman for Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, called the report “good news,” adding Portman “certainly supports efforts to stabilize the markets.” But unlike Kasich and Brown, Portman has yet to say he would vote for the bill.
Although House Republicans have said they will not consider the Senate bill, the report likely will intensify pressure on House Republicans because it would help stabilize the federally subsidized insurance markets created by the 2010 health law called Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act.
The compromise is designed to curb increases in the premiums charged by insurance companies for those federally subsidized policies. The bill would include what are known as cost-sharing reductions for the next two years to keep some of the policies sold through the markets more affordable and provide $106 million to advertise the availability of those plans.
In addition, the bill would provide states with greater opportunities to design individual insurance policies, a key demand by Republicans.
In a joint statement, Alexander and Murray said the new analysis “shows that our bill provides savings and ensures that funding two years of cost-sharing payments will benefit taxpayers and low-income Americans, not insurance companies.”
President Donald Trump this month announced an end to the cost-sharing subsidies and the advertising money. But Murray and Alexander said without the cost-sharing payments, health insurance premiums in the federally subsidized market will leap by 20 percent next year.
The Ohio Department of Insurance reports the average cost of Obamacare for an individual next year will be 34 percent higher, with “11 percent of that increase attributable to the assumption that insurers will not receive cost-sharing reduction payments in 2018.”
The senators also said that without their bill, “federal debt will increase by $194 billion over 10 years, due to the extra cost of subsidies to pay the higher premiums, and up to 16 million Americans may live in counties where they are not able to buy any insurance in the individual market.”
A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday refused a request by 18 states to continue the cost-sharing payments.