Aug 15
2017
The Two Mountains to Climb After the Push to Overturn the ACA Failed
Guest post by Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy, Omnicell.
What a momentous few days in Washington were observed at the end of July! On July 25, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), dealing with brain cancer, made a dramatic entrance into the Senate Chamber and delivered an impassioned plea to return to regular order and bipartisan compromise, suggesting a process that would begin with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) under chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and ranking member Patty Murray (D-WA) holding hearings and producing a bill that incorporates contributions from both sides.
McCain’s suggestion was applauded by many senators on both sides of the aisle. The Senate voted to debate repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 51-50, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote.
The following day, the Senate rejected a bill to repeal the ACA without replacement, 45-55, and in the early hours of July 28, the Senate rejected the “skinny repeal” of the ACA, the Health Care Freedom Act of 2017 (HCFA), 49-51, with Republican Senators McCain, Susan Collins (ME), and Lisa Murkowski (AK) joining the 48 Democrats to defeat the bill. The skinny repeal would have repealed the individual and employer mandates, temporarily repealed a tax on medical devices, defunded Planned Parenthood for a year, provided more money to community health centers, and given states more flexibility in complying with ACA regulations. Thus apparently ended the Republican quest to repeal and replace the ACA, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) conceded, “It is time to move on.”
In the wake of the HCFA’s defeat, supporters of the ACA were euphoric, but two sobering challenges facing the U.S. healthcare system—one short term, the other long term—loom like imposing mountains.
The Short-term Challenge
The immediate concern is how to stabilize the troubled ACA individual health insurance marketplaces, clearly the Achilles’ heel of the health reform law. Health insurers continue to leave in droves, with 80 departing this past year and Anthem announcing on August 7 that it will leave Nevada’s ACA marketplace in 2018. Premiums are rising many times the growth of both the Consumer Price Index and U.S. healthcare inflation. Moreover, President Donald Trump is threatening to cut off the ACA’s cost-sharing subsidies, which work to prop up the marketplaces and shield some individuals from the premium increases. Obviously, such a move by the Executive Branch would not encourage bipartisanship.
The Long-term Challenge
Even more daunting than the travails of the marketplaces is how to bend the healthcare cost curve. The ACA has not materially slowed the growth of national health expenditures, which will rise by 5.4 percent versus 2016 and reach $3.5 trillion this year. To put $3.5 trillion in perspective, it amounts to 18.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) and translates to almost $11,000 per person.
Additionally, nominal national health expenditures (not adjusted for inflation) are projected to increase by an average annual rate of 5.6 percent from 2016 to 2025, almost 1.5 times as fast as the growth in nominal GDP over the same period. As a result, healthcare costs will constitute a staggering 20 percent of GDP in 2025.
Conclusion
With the stalled effort to repeal and replace the ACA, Congress still must grapple with the hemorrhaging of the health insurance marketplaces and unacceptably high rates of healthcare cost inflation. Scaling these two mountains will require the kind of bipartisan compromise and collaboration that Senator McCain so passionately advocated.