What happens to Obamacare now?

ZACHARY SHERMAN, center, director of HealthSource RI, the state's health care insurance exchange, is shown speaking with James Thorsen, deputy director of finance, and Lindsay Lang, senior legal counsel. President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. / PBN FILE PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO
ZACHARY SHERMAN, center, director of HealthSource RI, the state's health care insurance exchange, is shown speaking with James Thorsen, deputy director of finance, and Lindsay Lang, senior legal counsel. President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. / PBN FILE PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO

PROVIDENCE – The head of HealthSource RI said the exchange is prepared to react to any changes made at the federal level regarding the Affordable Care Act in the wake of the election.
“The Affordable Care Act was established to increase access to high-quality, affordable health coverage, and here in Rhode Island, we remain committed to this mission. The progress we have seen under the reforms of the ACA – greatly reducing the rate of the uninsured and seeing an average decrease in premiums for the coming year, have made a real difference for Rhode Islanders,” HSRI Director Zachary Sherman said in a statement.

“We are prepared to react to any changes that may be made at the federal level. In the meantime, our primary focus is to continue working hard to provide the customer service Rhode Islanders need to enroll in coverage during open enrollment season,” he said.
Donald J. Trump has pledged he would repeal the Affordable Care Act – also known as Obamacare – if elected.
Now that he is the president-elect, the Obama administration is making a final push to get people into the program, Bloomberg News reported.
“This is the opportunity for them to come in and find affordable quality coverage,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said during a televised interview with Fox 5 in New York Thursday.
As for the politics of repeal, she added “I don’t think people want to go back to a place where 20 million Americans lose health insurance.”

Open enrollment for Rhode Island began Nov. 1 and will continue through Jan. 31. As of Nov. 1, 33,291 individuals were enrolled in coverage through HSRI for the current coverage year, according to an exchange spokeswoman.
A report that came out last month said Rhode Island has the seventh-lowest rate of uninsured individuals in the nation at 5.71 percent.

Bloomberg said Trump may be able to pick apart the law without signing legislation, and the uncertainty may dissuade potential enrollees from signing up, which could “further destabilize the markets for coverage, where people are already seeing higher prices and fewer choices in many regions.”
“Clearly we don’t want to do any harm to people already in the system,” said U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said his party wants to “work toward replacing Obamacare with common-sense reforms that will lower costs and increase choice.”
Deep Banerjee, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings, predicted in October that enrollment could decline as much as 8 percent compared with 2016. The U.S. last month predicted that about 13.8 million people would sign up.
For people who rely on Obamacare for insurance already, the uncertainty is unnerving.
Mary Hamel, a 55-year-old who works at a Minnesota nonprofit, buys health insurance through the law. She has epilepsy and worries about losing access to coverage.

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“I feel so vulnerable,” Hamel, who says she voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, said in a phone interview. “Insurance companies may give me the boot.”

The Obama administration plans to keep pushing enrollment under the ACA, and its allies have promised not to let the law go down without a fight.

“We’re going to lead an enormous fight to make sure that the huge number of people who are benefiting from the ACA don’t lose those benefits,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which helped push enactment of the law. The election “may have an effect on the big fight that is about to occur, but it does not, in any way, affect the ability for people to gain coverage through the enrollment process now.”

Time is short. Many large health insurers have pulled back from the law, and insurers typically start planning their policies many months ahead of time. Anthem Inc., which offers Affordable Care Act coverage in more than a dozen states, has said it will decide where to continue selling plans for 2018 around the middle of next year.

Health insurance CEOs said they’re betting Trump and congressional Republicans won’t end coverage right away. Centene’s Neidorff is betting on a transition period, and Mario Molina, CEO of Molina Healthcare Inc., said he thinks Republicans will keep a large role for private companies like his in Medicaid and insurance for individuals who don’t get coverage through work.

“This guy is a populist president. He got elected by the people,” Molina said. “And a lot of them, especially those people in the South and the Rust Belt states that voted for him, they need health care.”
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.

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