The Senate HELP chair’s proposal comes after the president has said he wants to send federal dollars to consumers instead of funding enhanced ACA subsidies.
Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy laid out his proposal Monday for putting money directly in Americans’ health savings accounts — the favored approach of President Donald Trump.
It’s unclear how much support the Louisiana Republican’s plan would have on Capitol Hill — including among GOP moderates who are still pushing for an extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. But Cassidy’s proposal is the most substantive health policy to be publicly released by any Republican that aligns with Trump’s vision to lower health care costs.
And it comes as congressional Republicans are locked in a fierce battle over the future of the credits, a central point of conflict during the lengthy government shutdown.
Cassidy’s framework, an attempt to soften the blow of skyrocketing Affordable Care Act premiums, would directly fund individual’s tax-advantaged health savings accounts, as opposed to spending billions on extending expiring enhanced premium tax credits for ACA insurance.
He told reporters Monday the proposal hinges on encouraging people enrolled in Obamacare plans to switch to bronze-level plans, which offer lower premiums and higher deductibles than other plans on the marketplace.
And while Cassidy conceded that Trump has not explicitly endorsed his plan, he has been in “very intense conversations, from late last week over the weekend,” with administration officials.
“If you look at the broad outlines of what I’m speaking of, it is clearly the broad outlines of what the president is speaking of,” Cassidy said Monday. “If you’re going to get it done by 2026, then you got to accept that which you’ve got to work with. And so it kind of pushes everybody in the same direction.”
In arguing for a health policy that would send federal dollars directly to individuals, Trump told reporters over the weekend that “insurance companies are making a fortune” and that we should “just pay this money directly to the people of our country and let them buy their own health insurance.”
Cassidy’s idea is that, with new funding in their HSAs, people enrolled in the bronze plans would be able to afford their higher out-of-pocket health care costs. But bronze plans by nature have high deductibles, and Cassidy’s legislative proposal does not yet have a cost estimate. Only bronze plans can accommodate an HSA.
Cassidy is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which under Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) has been hosting private discussions on health policy with panel Republicans. In the House, the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee is circulating legislation that would provide financial assistance to low-income ACA enrollees directly though their HSAs in lieu of subsidies that insurers apply on the back-end to peoples’ out-of-pocket costs.