that reduction payments not coming in so this will help to stabilize the market and that will help everyone. arthel: the president said let this expire and let those cost for the insurance companies skyrocket. this goes against that idea. obviously, one of the first republicans to endorse and i still support the president and endorses efforts to change washington but i hope he looks at this as an opportunity to show that we are making good faith efforts in congress to deal with the individual marketplace. i understand that if we aren t going to do anything in congress they will see the market place destabilized and maybe that is the political pressure that has to move senators to take action. my hope is that you don t do that because then millions of americans are in harm s way enough lasting we should be doing. arthel: congressman lapinski,
outbreak of bipartisanship on the hill the last couple of days. there s two separate efforts going on, one in the senate and one in the house. the senate one is much more narrow and more likely to succeed. this has lamar alexander and patty murray, who run the health committee, they re trying to come up with a way to fund those cost-sharing reduction payments for the next year. that gives insurers some sense of stability in the individual markets. it s basically money that helps lower income people pay things like deductibles and co-pays. the ball is in president trump s court to pay them the next month. they re asking the president to pay them to august and try to make this a congressional priority going forward. that has a lot of senators happy that they re seeing this bipartisan talk. on the house side you ve got a problem solvers caucus. more than 40 republicans and democrats combined working together for a much broader rewrite of the health care bill. they want to change the emplo
period if he doesn t make these payments but it also leads to insurers leaving the marketplaces. we heard yesterday from senator lamar alexander chairman of the senate health panel on which i sit make it very clear that if the president doesn t make these payments that people will be hurt. people will be harmed. and he also made a commitment in which i joined to working across the party aisle, to find our common ground and the cost sharing or the reduction payments are one particularly important area where there is bipartisan common ground. the other place there s common ground is on the fair drug pricing act. the idea that if you study health care well, there are a lot of problem areas. one of them is the remarkable price that americans pay for drugs. much higher than any comparable country of all the rich countries in the world, of all
getting 72% of their premiums subsidized by uncle sam. part of an obamacare arrangement. president trump has the ability to undo the subsidies using the office of personnel management because that s the agency president obama used to set them up. the president would be within his rights to cancel the obama rule that conferred this subsidy in congress. other americans in these exchanges are not getting employer subsidies. insurance companies are also waiting to find out if the cost-sharing reduction payments they ve been receiving to help cover low income americans will soon stop, as threatened. the court, district court in d.c., said this is an illegal payment. why should american taxpayers bail out the insurance industry? democrats don t see it as a bailout. this is about having
really hurt by the president s announcements that he s just going to cut off the cost-sharing subsidies basically, the cost-sharing reductions. so we know this needs to be fixed, and the uncertainty is causing premiums to go through the roof. right now insurance companies are getting ready to set premiums for next year, and so we know we need to fix this. so a group of us had decided a few months ago we wouldn t even touch health care. too difficult. we d work on some easier topics. but when it was clear this might crater in the senate, we thought we might as well start trying, see what we can do in this area. we ve got a list of those priorities if we can put them up on the screen. there are these five planks of what you re trying to do. one is, as you said, fund those cost-sharing reduction payments through congress, create dedicated stability fund for states to lower premiums and limit losses, exempt small businesses from the employer mandate, repeal the medical device tax and pro