Pelosi and Mnuchin's Last-Ditch Coronavirus Relief Talks

By Yuval Rosenberg

Stimulus Talks Resume as

Pelosi Trims Coronavirus Bill to $2.2 Trillion

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Treasury Secretary Steve
Mnuchin have resumed talks on a coronavirus relief bill after
Democrats introduced a slimmed-down, $2.2 billion bill Monday
evening.

Pelosi and Mnuchin spoke Monday evening and then discussed the
new 2,152-page bill Tuesday morning, with Pelosi saying the
conversation was “positive.” The pair are scheduled to speak again
Wednesday, when Mnuchin is expected to provide a detailed response
to the Democratic proposal.

“We’re in a negotiation, and hopefully we will come to a
bipartisan agreement that will remove all doubt that the
legislation will pass and be signed by the president,” Pelosi told
MSNBC Tuesday.

What’s in the bill: The package is basically a reduced
version of the $3.4 trillion Heroes Act the House passed in May.
Pelosi said Tuesday that the bill addresses all of the issues
Democrats say are most important, including aid for state and local
governments and additional unemployment assistance, but on a
shorter timeline to lower the cost by more than $1 trillion. “When
we reduced it, we didn’t take out priorities,” she said. “We just
reduced the timeline as to how long those benefits would last.”

Specific provisions include:

  • $600 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits, lasting
    through January,
  • another round of $1,200 stimulus payments,
  • $436 billion for state and local governments,
  • $225 billion for schools,
  • $75 billion for coronavirus testing and tracing programs,
  • $57 billion for childcare,
  • $25 billion to maintain payrolls in the airline industry,
  • $10 billion for food aid,
  • an extension of the Paycheck Protection Program to aid small
    businesses.

Can it pass? Lawmakers are trying one last time to
negotiate a relief package before the rapidly approaching election,
but Pelosi’s smaller bill will still be a tough sell for many
Republicans. Even with Pelosi knocking $1.2 trillion off her
initial proposal, the two sides are still hundreds of billions of
dollars apart. Less than three weeks ago, the GOP-controlled Senate
was unable to pass a $500 billion relief bill, and despite
President Trump’s call for Republicans to support “much higher
numbers,” there’s no sense that many minds have changed in the
upper chamber. Still, with Mnuchin reportedly open to a package
worth as much as $1.5 trillion, there is some hope that an
agreement could be reached.

Time is running out: The House is
expected to leave town by the end of the week, leaving very little
time to negotiate such a massive bill. “If no agreement seems
likely,” Politico Playbook
said Tuesday, “Pelosi and House Democratic leaders
will hold a vote on their own $2.2 trillion bill as soon as
Wednesday and then go home, guaranteeing that Congress won’t send
more help until after Election Day.”

Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Boost Job Numbers

The job market was remarkably strong before the coronavirus
pandemic hit earlier this year, with the unemployment rate falling
to a 50-year low. Even so, President Trump’s promise to be the
“greatest jobs president that God ever created” was looking a
little iffy, with the job creation trend running a bit lower than
the one established during the Obama administration in the wake of
the Great Recession.

“Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the 2017 tax reform
bill, reduced taxes for the wealthy and corporations, but it didn’t
translate into big gains in good jobs for average Americans,”
Bloomberg’s Reade Pickert and Catarina Saraiva
wrote Tuesday.

The quality of the jobs being created during the last three
years had fallen, Pickert and Saraiva said, and Trump’s trade war
with China depressed growth in the agricultural and manufacturing
sectors.  

All of that is water under the bridge at this point
though, after the coronavirus wiped out years of gains in just a
few months. “Now, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump heads
into the November election on track to be the first U.S. leader
since World War II to oversee a net loss of jobs during a four-year
term,” the reporters said.

Quote of the Day: The GOP's Preexisting
Conditions Problem

“There’s a reason Donald Trump has never produced a
health-care plan that protects consumers with preexisting medical
conditions: Ending protections for the sick is the central
mechanism that all GOP health-care proposals use to try to lower
costs for the healthy. … Put another way: Reducing protections for
patients with greater health needs isn’t a bug in the GOP plans;
it’s a key feature.”

– Ronald Brownstein, senior editor at The
Atlantic, in a new piece, “Republicans Are Trapped on Preexisting
Conditions.” Read it
here.

Short-Term Health Insurance Plans Promoted
by Trump Spent Relatively Little on Claims in 2019

The short-term health insurance plans promoted by President
Trump and his administration — and derided by critics as “junk
insurance” — spent significantly less than Obamacare-compliant
plans on paying out members’ medical claims last year, according to
new
data from the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners.

The Trump administration in 2018 changed an Obama-era rule that
limited coverage under cheaper, short-term plans to three months.
The new rule allowed those plans — which, unlike Obamacare plans,
are not required to cover preexisting medical conditions — to last
for up to 364 days and be renewed for up to three years.

The data, highlighted by
Modern Healthcare, show that health insurers
selling those skimpier plans spent about 62 cents of every dollar
in premiums on paying medical claims. The five insurers that earned
the most in premiums from such plans spent about 55 cents of every
dollar in premiums on claims. Obamacare plans are required to spend
at least 80% of premium dollars on claims or rebate the difference
to enrollees.

Enrollment surges: Yet as Americans hunt for less costly
insurance coverage, enrollment in short-term plans jumped last
year, rising from 86,600 at the end of 2018 to 188,000 as of
December 31, 2019, Modern Healthcare reports. Insurers collected
$248.2 million in short-term plan premiums last year, up from
$109.6 million the year before.

Caveats about the numbers: The new data “likely captures
just a fraction of the market for short-term, limited-duration
health coverage, as these policies often fly under the radar of
insurance regulators. The data also reflects enrollment in the
plans at a point in time and not over the course of the year, so
customers who had a policy but dropped it before then may not be
counted,” Modern Healthcare’s Shelby Livingston cautions.

The bottom line: The new data suggest
that there is substantial demand for cheaper plans, even though
short-term plans “offer weaker coverage with more caveats that
allow them to not pay," Justin Giovannelli, project director at the
Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, told
Modern Healthcare. Experts warn that people signing up for such
plans might not realize that they are getting far less
comprehensive coverage or may risk having their claims denied or
coverage rescinded. Critics also fear that enrollment in such
plans, particularly by healthier people, could undermine the
Obamacare market by driving up premiums.

Charts of the Day: What's Driving U.S. Health
Spending

Why does the United States spend so much more on health care
than comparable countries do? It’s not just higher drug prices, as
a new issue brief from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the
Kaiser Family Foundation shows. “While it is true that many
brand-name prescription drugs are priced higher in the U.S. than in
peer countries, health spending data indicates that other spending
categories – particularly hospital and physician payments – are
greater drivers of health spending,” authors Nisha Kurani and
Cynthia Cox write.

(The Fiscal Times is an editorially independent
organization funded by the late Peter G. Peterson and his
family.)

Spending on inpatient and outpatient care
accounted for 76% of the difference in per person costs between the
U.S. and comparable countries, with Americans spending $6,624 per
person in 2018 while peer nations spent an average of $2,718 per
person. The United States also spent $736 more per person on
administrative costs (more than 14% of the difference in total
spending) and $513 more per person on prescription drugs and other
medical goods (10% of the difference in
spending).
It's debate night! Will either
candidate be able to sway voters? If you're not excited to watch
tonight's showdown in Cleveland, maybe this debate
drinking
game (or bingo game) will help.

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