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Report: HHS to cut off enrollment for health law's high-risk pools
The Health and Human Services Department will soon stop accepting new applicants into insurance pools for people with pre-existing conditions, The Washington Post reported Friday.
President Obama's healthcare law established new state-by-state insurance pools for people who had been denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. The high-risk pools were designed to serve as a bridge to 2014, when such denials will become illegal.
HHS will quit accepting new applicants as early as this weekend to ensure it has enough money left to cover the people who have already enrolled, the Post reported.
HHS initially had trouble getting people to enroll in the high-risk pools, partly because the premiums were higher than expected. The department loosened its eligibility criteria to make the program more attractive.
The high-risk pools came with $5 billion in funding. Slightly less than half of that money remains — only enough to cover the expenses of the roughly 100,000 people who are already enrolled for the rest of this year, according to the Post.
Republicans have proposed a similar system of government-run high-risk pools as an alternative to the healthcare law's requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions.
But a top HHS official told the Post that the experience with this high-risk pool shows that "this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run."
