House Committee Report Takes Aim at Short-Term Plans

by Leslie Small

More than a year after they began probing health insurers and brokers for information to fuel an investigation of short-term, limited-duration insurance (STLDI) plans, Democratic leaders of the House Energy & Commerce Committee released a report concluding that this market's growth has come at the expense of consumers who are often duped into purchasing bare-bones coverage.

Policy experts, however, disagree about what conclusions can actually be drawn from the latest salvo in an ongoing debate over alternatives to Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange plans.

"The nutshell of the report is it confirms everything that these sort of smaller studies that have been highly imperfect have showed about this market," says Katie Keith, an attorney, research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. That includes misleading marketing, various benefit gaps, the use of pre-existing condition exclusions and plan rescissions, she adds.

To Keith, the most striking aspect of the report was how many STLDI plans are being sold through associations, which makes it more difficult for individual states to regulate them.

But Chris Pope, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, says "it's of limited value to have an analysis that’s kind of saying, 'Well, what is the worst thing that we can find about this market and judge a market by the worst possible thing that's out there.'"

In Pope's view, the most interesting finding was the fact that 3 million people were enrolled in STLDI plans in 2019. "It's somewhat toward the top end of estimates that had been put out previously — clearly a lot of people do value these plans," says Pope, who authored a report in 2019 for the Manhattan Institute that argued the merits of STLDI plans.

The House committee report calls for federal legislation that subjects STLDI plans to all of the ACA's protections. In the absence of that, it recommends that states limit STLDI plan duration to 90 days, prohibit renewability, ban the sale of STLDI plans during ACA open enrollment, require such plans to be sold only in person to stymie aggressive marketing tactics, and comply with the ACA's consumer protection provisions.

From Health Plan Weekly