It seems increasingly likely that health care politics will play an important role in the midterm elections come November. But unlike every election since 2010, this year finds the Democrats playing offense and the Republicans back on their heels.
There is one health proposal most Democrats and Republicans agree is a good idea — providing “reinsurance” to help insurers pay for their sickest patients, thus enabling them to lower premiums for everyone. This week, the Trump administration approved reinsurance plans requested by Maine and Wisconsin. But legislation in Congress that would extend those programs nationwide failed to get a vote in either the House or Senate earlier this year — another casualty in the partisan fight over health care.
This week’s panelists for KHN’s “What the Health?” are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Alice Ollstein of Talking Points Memo and Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call.
Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:
- Congressional Democrats are making preexisting conditions a key debating point, including Senate candidates running in deep-red states, such as Missouri and West Virginia. The guarantee of coverage even when a person has a medical problem is one of the most popular provisions in the Affordable Care Act. Democrats are playing up the…
