Trump Administration Expands Short-Term Health Plans That Need Not Cover Pre-Existing Conditions, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Sick Americans Could Still Buy Insurance That Helped Them

WASHINGTON. In a move the administration hailed as restoring freedom to the American health care consumer, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury on Wednesday finalized a rule dramatically expanding short-term, limited-duration insurance plans, resolving the long-standing problem that Americans with pre-existing conditions had been able to purchase coverage that paid for treating them.

The rule extends the maximum length of the plans, which are exempt from the Affordable Care Act's consumer protections, from three months to just under a year, and permits them to be renewed for up to three years. Because the plans are not obligated to cover prescription drugs, maternity care, mental health treatment, or any condition a customer already has, officials described them as offering Americans a wider range of choices, including the choice to discover at the worst possible moment that they had purchased almost nothing.

"We have great, great health care, and it's much less expensive," the President said, declining to specify which expenses had been removed to achieve the savings. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the expansion would deliver relief to the many healthy Americans burdened by the knowledge that their premiums were helping to cover the sick, a knowledge the official described as "a tax on feeling fine."

Analysts noted that the rule advanced the same goal as the repeal legislation that had collapsed in the Senate one year earlier, namely the steady removal of coverage from people who need it, but accomplished it through regulation rather than a vote, sparing lawmakers the inconvenience of being recorded. Insurers offering the plans welcomed the change, as did brokers, who earn substantially higher commissions selling short-term policies than they do selling plans that cover things.

Industry observers warned that pulling healthy customers into cheaper plans would raise premiums for everyone remaining in the regulated market, a consequence the administration characterized not as a flaw but as added encouragement for those customers to leave as well.

At press time, a man who had faithfully paid eleven months of premiums was reading the eighteenth page of his policy in a hospital billing office, slowly arriving at the meaning of the phrase "limited duration."