What Changes to Expect to Health Insurance in 2017

With Donald Trump's inauguration this Friday, one hot topic news item is what is going to happen to health insurance under his administration.
A few his are already guaranteed to happen, and a few are up in the air.

First, you can expect to see the Affordable Care Act (ACA) be repealed shortly after Trump takes office.  Republican congressman and women have been working over the past couple of weeks to dismantle the ACA.  The effects of this shouldn’t be very large.  Your insurance policy will still be good for its one-year guarantee issue length.  We will see most of the changes coming to individual policies and just a few to the group plans. 

This brings us to the next topic, what happens when the ACA gets repealed.  Almost nothing in the short term.  Just like when the ACA was put in place, it will take awhile to take out the regulations that were put in place, and again if you currently have a policy it is good until it comes up for renewal.   For individuals trying to get policies for 2018, nothing is set in stone but there is reason to believe that you will be able to once again get access to large networks and if community rate tables end up being taken out, many people could see their monthly premiums drastically decrease.  There have also been talks of eliminating the individual mandate.  Which means the tax penalty you have to pay currently if you do not have insurance would go away.  On the group side of things, not a whole lot would change.  For groups that have 50 members or less, community rates would be gone.  Which means just like individuals everyone would get underwritten, and you could see monthly premiums drastically drop.   

When the ACA does get repealed that will also mean a lot of regulations will no longer exist.  State mandates, in theory, would go away.  However, again there is good reason to believe that these mandates would stick around but the list of what’s covered would be cut in half. One major worry would is that children would no longer be able to stay on their parents plan until 26, and pre-existing conditions would no longer be covered.  Both Trump and Republican leaders have stated that those two aspects of the ACA would be included in any replacement that would come after the ACA.

To summarize, I wouldn’t be too concerned about changes coming to health insurance for 2017.  A lot of the changes are truly unknown.  If you already have an insurance plan, you should not have any issues.  The significant changes that we will most likely see starting in 2018 and beyond will have to deal with how individual and group policies are going to be underwritten.