CREATING INSURANCE EXCHANGES: A RACE WITH NO FINISH LINE?

State governments, like California’s, that are already well into the efforts involved in establishing insurance exchanges meeting ACA requirements, may be starting to worry after the mid-term election results.

With Republican politicians apparently unified in their determination to roll back health care reform, is there a risk that come 2014 there will be neither a statutory requirement nor any funding to support exchanges? Could states’ efforts to build exchanges be in vain?

About-to-be-Speaker Boehner is promising a House bill to repeal ACA early in 2011. It’s likely to pass, but then will almost certainly die in the Senate. In the highly unlikely event of a repeal bill passing the Senate, it will then certainly be vetoed by President Obama.

In the cynical world of politics, of course, having Democrats kill a reform repeal bill is exactly what Republicans are aiming for, so that it’s almost certain that the Boehner bill will be little more than a simple repeal, rather than any attempt to restructure reform in accordance with conservative principles. Having watched the Democrats tie themselves in knots during the 2009 reform debate, no sensible Republican politician will want to risk the same by proposing anything much more specific than a simple rollback.

All of this is part of the prologue to the 2012 election, when Republicans—still playing on public confusion and dissatisfaction with reform—hope to capture the Senate and the White House. And that’s really the big worry for states trying to implement ACA.

President Palin (h-m-m, maybe) will certainly make repeal of ACA a priority. So where does that leave state exchanges, which even under the current reform legislation don’t have to be implemented until 2014, but for which planning and implementation efforts may take three or more years?

One problem that President Palin will face is that, after four years of unrelenting Republican criticism of ACA, people will expect the new administration to have an alternative. And with unrelenting premium increases continuing and perhaps as many as sixty million uninsured, this expectation will be accompanied by considerable public pressure. In other words, a simple rollback of ACA isn’t in the cards.

A second problem for President Palin is that her own party (Republican, not Tea) will be less than unified in their opinions. In fact, some of the pre-ACA proposals for insurance exchanges came from the GOP side of the aisle. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since it was the conservative Heritage Foundation that was an early backer of the exchange concept, while key congressman Paul Ryan is a strong supporter of a voucher approach, something that needs an exchange in order to be effective.

So, will our first female president dump the insurance exchange model along with the parts of reform she really hates? Probably not. Aside from the likelihood of outcries from states who will already have made major investments in their exchanges, it’s a model that could support a conservative rewrite of ACA.

What’s a reasonable conclusion? While there will continue to be plenty of uncertainty about implementation of many details of reform, the states that have already indicated their intent to establish exchanges probably will continue to have federal support. After all, what could be more Republican than effective market competition?