What Went Down On Health Care This Week

The Senate may be preparing to include changes to some complicated but consequential waivers in the “skinny bill” it’s writing. A little explanation about what those are: One provision of Obamacare was that states can apply for waivers to many of the health insurance regulations in the law if they want to experiment with different models of health coverage. They can be used to waive the Essential Health Benefits, or to change the subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance. The trick is that in order to be approved, states must show that at least as many would be covered as under the normal rules, and that the coverage would be at least as affordable and as comprehensive, all without increasing the federal deficit. A previous iteration of the Senate bill (one that effectively failed earlier this week) included changes to those waivers. Under that plan, states would have been able waive the regulations so long as they showed it wouldn’t increase the federal deficit. States would only need to write a description of how the new model would address the other issues of who is covered, how much it would cost and what that coverage would look like. It’s not yet clear whether the provision in the bill being written today would be similar.