WASHINGTON — An advisory panel of experts Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health care law.
Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine.
“The question is what is the fairest, most transparent way to get a reasonable set of benefits and still keep it affordable for both the user and for the taxpayers,” said committee member Marjorie Ginsburg. “We don’t want to say that one is more important than the other. . . . But the limiting issue obviously is affordability.”
About 68 million Americans, many of them currently insured, ultimately would be affected by the new benefits package. That’s bigger than the number of seniors enrolled in Medicare.
The advisers recommended that the package be built on midtier health plans currently offered by small employers, expanded to include certain services such as mental health and squeezed into a real-world budget.
