Cassidy's proposal covers six key policy areas, including empowering consumers, cutting administrative costs and bringing down health provider monopolies. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Republicans overall may not be eager to press ahead with more efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act, but Senator Bill Cassidy, R-LA, has unveiled an eight-page paper proposing "Ideas to Make Health Care Affordable Again."
Not all the ideas in Cassidy's paper are new, and Cassidy acknowledges that it's unlikely Congress will take any action on them any time soon, according to a report in The Advocate, but he's putting them out there nonetheless. Some of his suggestions come from the bill that he and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, proposed last fall, and came in for criticism at the time.
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The paper proposes changes to six key policy areas:
- Empowering patients to reduce their health care costs
- Lowering health insurance premiums
- Ending health care monopolies by increasing competition
- Decreasing drug costs for patients
- Eliminating administrative burdens and costs
- Reducing costs through primary care, prevention, and chronic disease management
To help empower patients, his proposal suggests price transparency and an expansion of health savings accounts, as well as getting consumers to be proactive shoppers when it comes to the cost of care.
In addition, he suggests various ways to cut health insurance premiums, including cost-sharing reduction subsidies, allowing plans to be sold across state lines, providing federal funding for reinsurance or "invisible high-risk pools," and allowing states to combine the Medicaid expansion and individual marketplace risk pools.
He also favors short-term limited-duration plans, despite their limited usefulness but because of their lower cost, as well as funding to encourage the young and healthy to buy coverage.
Boosting competition among providers and ending hospital monopolies, his report says, can be particularly helpful to patients in rural areas, since rural providers are reimbursed at lower rates than urban ones, based in part on wages. Instead, he says, there should be both a floor and a ceiling on reimbursement.
Drug costs can be controlled by greater transparency—for instance, allowing pharmacists to tell patients that their prescriptions could be cheaper if paid for with cash instead of insurance—as well as "[b]lunting tools of regulatory arbitrage and gaming the system," using incentives to encourage better outcomes and regulations to make sure the U.S. pays what other countries pay for innovative drugs.
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Marlene Satter
Marlene Y. Satter has worked in and written about the financial industry for decades.
