Congressman Bob Good | wikipedia
Congressman Bob Good | wikipedia
WASHINGTON, D.C. – On April 28 at 10:15am ET, Chairman Bob Good (VA-05) will be presiding over the first Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee Hearing of the 118th Congress on “Reducing Health Care Costs for Working Americans and Their Families.”
Tune in to the livestream here.
In anticipation of this hearing, Good unveiled his own initiative to counter outrageous insurance prices and ultimately decrease healthcare costs for Americans. Rep. Good introduced the Self-Insurance Protection Act to safeguard the ability of businesses to self-insure by protecting access to stop-loss insurance. This legislation will prevent federal regulators from redefining stop-loss insurance and over-regulating it to the point that it is inaccessible. By increasing access to stop-loss insurance, this legislation will expand choice for American employers who want to offer health benefits to their employees.“
Obamacare federalized health insurance—instead of providing accessible healthcare, Democrats have layered health insurance with regulations, inflationary subsidies, and misguided economic incentives. This has made healthcare unaffordable in the commercial market,” said Good. “I want my constituents and Americans across the nation to be protected from catastrophic health bills, and I believe the increased competition of the free market, enabled by my bill, will do just that.”
Self-insurance is a valuable tool for businesses to provide flexible and affordable benefits to employees with limited government regulation. Stop-loss insurance is essential for small employers to successfully bear the risk of self-insuring. The Self-Insurance Protection Act will formalize protections for stop-loss insurance at the federal and state level to ensure its accessibility for both small and large employers.
Cosponsors: Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI)
Background:
- Employers who manage a self-insured health plan assume the financial risk of providing health benefits to their workers. Rather than contract with an insurance company, self-insured employers pay directly for the workers’ health care claims and services.
- While this requires employers to assume risk, it has many benefits:
- Permits employers to customize benefits plans to best fit their workforce
- Permits employers to operate without complying with all categories of essential health benefits mandated by the Affordable Care Act or state-mandated coverage requirements
- In 2022, 103 million people received health insurance through a self-insured health care plan.
- Many employers choosing to self-insure will purchase stop-loss insurance to shield themselves against a catastrophic claim. Stop-loss insurance protects against high claims from individuals and large aggregate claims during certain periods.
- Self-insurance is a threat to the Left’s agenda of Medicare-for-all because it gives employers and employees choices. As a result, there has been a push at the federal level to regulate stop-loss insurance so that it makes self-insuring unaffordable and unavailable for businesses.
- To force more individuals onto the Obamacare exchange, the Obama Administration attempted to eliminate stop-loss insurance. Some states are also attacking stop-loss insurance. For example, New York currently has a law that prohibits the sale of stop-loss insurance to groups of less than 100.
- Former Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN) introduced a version of the Self-Insurance Protection Act, which passed the House 400-16 in 2017 in the 115th Congress.
Original source can be found here
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