Manatt’s Joel Ario, a managing director with Manatt Health, was quoted by Law360 in an article discussing the latest Affordable Care Act repeal efforts.
Law360 noted that the Senate’s failure to move the Graham-Cassidy bill forward will likely result in pausing similar efforts for the remainder of the year, but that other attempts to repeal or alter the ACA will likely resume in the future.
The upcoming deadline for health insurers to sign up to sell on federal insurance exchanges for 2018 could be indicative of what approach the GOP may take in the future. Ario explained that the administration’s treatment of the requirements for insurers to provide essential health benefits—the details of which are in the hands of the Department of Health & Human Services—and the ACA’s individual mandate could be a telling area.
“They can’t not enforce it, but there were broader exemptions to the mandate originally [and] they could go back to as broad as, maybe even broader, than they were originally,” he said.