Iowa tries another end run around the Affordable Care Act

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Iowa tries another end run around the Affordable Care Act

By Amy Goldstein April 2 at 12:57 PM

As a growing number of Republican-led states look for end runs around the Affordable Care Act, Iowa is embracing a strategy that contends not all health plans are actually health insurance.

Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) on Monday signed into law a bill allowing the century-old Iowa Farm Bureau to collaborate with the state’s dominant insurer to sell “health benefit plans,” which are expected to cost health customers less than ACA coverage because they will not have to comply with federal requirements.

The law says such plans “sponsored by a nonprofit agricultural organization . . . shall be deemed not to be insurance.” That means they will be allowed to avoid both federal and state insurance regulations.

Within Iowa, this new curve around the ACA has sparked debate over whether the strategy is a creative path to offer some residents an alternative to spiking prices in the insurance marketplace the state created under the federal law — or a path to substandard coverage that will divide the healthy from the sick.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/iowa-tries-another-end-run-around-the-affordable-care-act/2018/04/01/cd25baec-3429-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html

[MiniMe]

1. And what is going to happen when the "agricultural organization" doesn't pay a claim

Who will be responsible?

[SharonClark]

2. The Farm Bureau is an insurance company in all but name only now.

"Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) on Monday signed into law a bill allowing the century-old Iowa Farm Bureau to collaborate with the state’s dominant insurer to sell “health benefit plans,” which are expected to cost health customers less than ACA coverage because they will not have to comply with federal requirements.

The law says such plans “sponsored by a nonprofit agricultural organization . . . shall be deemed not to be insurance.” That means they will be allowed to avoid both federal and state insurance regulations."

The R legislators in Iowa and elsewhere pass whatever nonsense they want to: people like dirty drinking water, abortion is not part of health care, tax handouts to religious schools, rural areas should mandate what urban areas can do, guns, guns, guns.