A Victory for Consumer Protections and Health Insurance Freedom

Last year, the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services worked within federal law to expand consumer protections and restore Americans ’ freedom to choose the health insurance that meets their needs. On Friday, a federal court rebuffed an effort to block those protections and force Americans into ObamaCare. First, a little background.In 1996, Congress exempted “short-term limited duration insurance” from federal health insurance regulations. Congress never defined what “short-term” or “limited duration” meant. So in 1997, the Clinton administration gave meaning to those terms by decreeing that health insurance plans qualify for the exemption s o long as they have a contract term, and a total duration, that last less than 12 months. The Bush administration finalized this definition in 2004. When Congress enacted the ironically named Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, it tied that law ’s copious regulation of the individual health insurance market to the same definition of health insurance Congress created in 1996. That means – you guessed it – “short-term, limited duration insurance” is also exempt from the ACA’s costly regulations.When the ACA began to make the cost of health insurance soar in 2014, the Obama admininstration noticed that consumers were taking refuge in the short-term market, where premiums could be 50-70 percent lower than ACA premiums. So in 2016, the Obama administration arbitrarily shortened the maximum allow...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs