With Premiums Likely To Spike Just Before Midterms, Lawmakers Are Bracing For Blame Game Battle

Language on abortion threw a wrench in both sides' plans to add money to stabilize the marketplace into the sweeping spending bill that Congress passed last week. Now they'll have to deal with the potential fallout. Meanwhile, some Americans are opting to take a chance they'll stay healthy over paying astronomical insurance bills.

The Wall Street Journal: Health-Insurance Premiums Loom As Election IssueHealth-insurance premiums are likely to jump right before the November elections, a result of Congress’s omission of federal money to shore up insurance exchanges from its new spending package. Lawmakers from both parties had pushed to include the funding in the $1.3 trillion spending law signed Friday, but they couldn’t agree on details. A battle has already begun over how to cast the blame for the expected rate increases. Democrats blame GOP lawmakers for the failure of negotiations over the funding, saying Republican leaders demanded the inclusion of abortion restrictions they knew would be unacceptable to Democrats. Republicans say that they negotiated in good faith and that Democrats rejected reasonable rules on abortion. (Armour, 3/25)

Bloomberg: Why Some Americans Are Risking It And Skipping Health Insurance Across America there are thousands of people like the Buchanans, the Owenses and the Bobbies making the same hard decision to go without health insurance, despite the benefits. They’re risking it—betting that they’ve got enough savings, enough of a back-up plan, or enough luck to get them through a twisted knee, a cancer, or a car wreck. Bloomberg is following a dozen of these families this year in an effort to understand the trade-offs when a dollar spent on health insurance can’t be spent on something else. Some are financially comfortable. Others are scraping by. (Tozzi, 3/26)

And in other news —

The Baltimore Sun: Maryland Lawmakers Set To Do What Congress Can't: Protect Obamacare With Tax On Insurers Maryland’s Republican governor and Democratic legislature have forged a striking bipartisan proposal to accomplish what Washington has failed to do: stabilize Obamacare. Given the stakes — 150,000 Marylanders potentially losing health insurance in an election year — lawmakers in the General Assembly worked quickly and quietly to try to avert the crisis by agreeing on a new $380 million tax to stabilize the individual insurance market. (Cox and Dance, 3/23)

Nashville Tennessean: Obamacare: Bipartisan Push For Health Insurance Fix Unravels In The SenateNo one thought it would be easy to get Democrats and Republicans on board with a plan to stabilize the nation’s volatile health insurance markets. But no one thought those efforts would collapse like this.Months of health-insurance negotiations led by two senators with a track record of producing bipartisan bills ended abruptly last week amid a flurry of finger-pointing and bitter charges by each side that the other was playing politics. (Collins, 3/25)

Kaiser Health News: Podcast: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’ Health Law Fix Misses The Spending Bill TrainCongress passed a bill to fund much of the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year just hours before its March 23 deadline. But not included in that legislation is a bipartisan bill aimed at stabilizing premiums for individuals who buy their own health insurance. That proposal collapsed in partisan rancor after lawmakers were unable to resolve a fight over abortion and other issues. (3/23)

This is part of the KHN Morning Briefing, a summary of health policy coverage from major news organizations. Sign up for an email subscription.

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