The discussion of new ObamaCare Exchange has generated debate — and concern — in North Carolina.
Meanwhile, the latest Bloomberg Businessweek discusses the possibility of a federal compromise on health care exchanges:
Strangely, given the recent acrimony, the two parties’ positions on health exchanges are almost mirror images. The deficit-reduction plan devised by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) contemplates health exchanges only for people 65 and older. President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has them only for those who have not reached the age of Medicare eligibility. Alice M. Rivlin, White House budget director under President Bill Clinton, sees that divergence as an opportunity for compromise. “Chairman Ryan has had trouble explaining why he is for exchanges in his Medicare reform and against them in ACA, and President Obama has the opposite problem,” Rivlin, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, wrote on May 16 on The American Square blog.
In a May 31 interview, Rivlin suggested the parties could meet in the middle on a plan that she and retired Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) advanced last year as co-chairs of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force. A compromise would incorporate health exchanges into Medicare while keeping traditional fee-for-service care alive as one alternative. “There hasn’t been a serious bipartisan negotiation,” Rivlin says. “That has to happen.” …
… Not everyone is convinced that Republicans and Democrats can find common ground on health exchanges. Robert E. Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Policy Innovation, says the two sides’ aspirations for them are too different. Conservatives, he says, favor state-level exchanges with light regulation, while liberals want a single national exchange that, in his opinion, would be a stepping stone to single-payer health care. Says Moffit: “People on both sides of the ideological spectrum have written in favor of health exchanges, but I can promise you that they don’t mean the same thing.”
