Health Insurance
In 2019 the WY house passed a bill (HB0085) that would take advantage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) 1332 wavier. Basically, this would have taken federal flow through dollars to finance a health insurance backstop. Several states took advantage of this waiver, but the bill died in the WY Senate for complexity reasons. In 2019 this backstop is exactly the same type of fed funded insurance backstop that WY ranchers received in order to recover their cattle losses after the cold wet winter of 2022-23. The ACA 1332 waiver basically works to recover costs associated with catastrophic illnesses or events. We certainly need something like this in WY since 70% of Health Insurance premiums go to 10% of the insured to cover very high medical costs. This means 30% of premiums paid remain for (normal) health visits. Since ACA based insurance requires 80% of premiums collected to be used for health care, a ACA backstop would force lower premiums as it did in Maryland, Alaska (almost 40% reduction) and many other states.
Health Care is a major and complex subject. However, the health insurance backstop that failed in the senate in 2019 is just one of many complex health insurance issues that could be part of a necessary and immediate fix and appropriate for this voter forum!