P
resident Obama is to post his unified proposal for overhauling the health-care systemon the Internet today so it’s time to start getting use to a new acronym: HIRA.
HIRA stands for the Health Insurance Rate Authority, a new seven-member panel that would be set up to determine what’s a reasonable rate increase for health-insurance policies. The proposed authority would include consumer and industry representatives as well as a doctor and others, reports say.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would be given the power to curb and potentially block increases deemed out of bounds under the Obama plan. Exactly how all this would work is a bit fuzzy but you get the gist from articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and WSJ.
The overhaul bill already approved by the Senate would give government some increased authority to review and try to control rate increases, the LA Times notes. But adding it to the Obama proposal — which is unveiled ahead of Thursday’s bipartisan health summit — elevates the issue amid a recent backlash over rates sparked by WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross of California unit to raise premiums on individual policies by as much as 39%.
The rate-review proposal “could put pressure on Republicans to go along, even though they have decried the Democrats health reform efforts as a ‘big government takeover’ of the system and generally resisted any efforts to give the government a greater role in the private insurance market,” Politico said.