By Shelby Livingston
October 25, 2017 - Modern Healthcare
A federal judge on Wednesday denied a request from
state attorneys general to stop the Trump administration from scrapping the
cost-sharing reduction subsidies that are paid to insurance companies to help
lower costs for low-income Americans.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria,
an Obama administration appointee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern
District of California, said the Trump administration had a stronger legal
argument for stopping payment for CSRs than the 19 state attorneys general that
sued to restore them. Reviving the payments would be "counterproductive,"
Chhabria wrote
"State regulators have been working for months to prepare
for the termination of these payments. And although you wouldn't know it from
reading the states' papers in this lawsuit, the truth is that most state
regulators have devised responses that give millions of lower-income people
better health coverage options than they would otherwise have had," Chhabria
wrote in his opinion released Wednesday.
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