More than half of the Democratic Party caucus in the US Senate on Monday accused the Trump administration of covering up massive planned premium increases that are going to hit Americans who buy their health insurance through Affordable Care Act exchanges.
In a letter to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz, the senators charged that his agency has “failed to open early window-shopping” the week before the start of open enrollment, which they said has left “millions of Americans who buy their own insurance on Healthcare.gov... unaware of the catastrophic premium hikes barreling towards them.”
The senators emphasized that the early window-shopping period is crucial because “the 24 million people who buy insurance on the ACA Marketplace need as much time and information as possible to understand and prepare for these significant premium increases.”
The letter also argued that CMS has reduced enrollees’ ability to access this crucial information by issuing guidance last summer that “allowed insurance companies to omit premium numbers and tax credit information from the notices they are required to send to enrollees ahead of open enrollment,” while also “allowing insurance plans to delay sending information to their enrollees.”
As a result of this, the letter continued, “millions of Americans have still not received any information from their insurance plan, or from CMS, about the biggest premium hike in history.”
The senators’ letter concluded with a demand for CMS to “launch window-shopping immediately and deliver the transparency American families deserve ahead of open enrollment on November 1.”
The fight over health insurance premiums is at the heart of the current shutdown of the federal government, as Democrats say they will not vote to fund the government without an extension of enhanced ACA tax credits that were first passed into law under the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
The Washington Post last week reported on leaked documents showing that the most popular healthcare plans purchased on the ACA exchanges are expected to see a 30% hike next year, which would mark the “largest annual premium increases by far in recent years.”
Were the enhanced tax credits for these plans allowed to expire, the Post added, this would likely result in millions of Americans seeing their insurance premiums double or triple next year.
The expiring subsidies aren’t the only threat to Americans’ healthcare, as Republicans over the summer passed a massive budget law that cut spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would result in more than 10 million people, among the nation’s poorest, losing their coverage. Congressional Democrats have also demanded undoing some Medicaid cuts in government shutdown negotiations.