This Tennessee insurer doesn’t play by Obamacare’s rules — and the GOP sees it as the future
FRANKLIN, Tenn. — When Phil Yates walked into a tiny strip mall storefront last month, he was hopeful he might walk out with an affordable health insurance plan.
Here in the Volunteer State, the 61-year-old retiree had a decent shot: Another 61-year-old retiree could have walked into that same office and enrolled in a relatively basic plan for as little as $283 per month, far less than the $860 a month Yates paid this year for an Obamacare plan.
But Yates has diabetes — and while that wouldn’t matter to other insurers, it matters a lot to the local company he had pinned his hopes on: Tennessee Farm Bureau Health Plans. Farm Bureau, as it’s known colloquially, is still using customers’ health status to determine their rates and eligibility — so Yates’s diabetes is enough to exclude him from coverage. In fact, excluding consumers like Yates is one of the main reasons Farm Bureau’s prices are so low — the company can keep costs down by mainly covering people who are healthy.
For every other insurer in the country, this kind of discrimination was made illegal by the Affordable Care Act. But because of a decades-old state law, Farm Bureau’s health plans don’t have to play by Obamacare’s rules.
For many Republicans in Washington, plans like the Farm Bureau’s, with fewer regulatory burdens and lower prices, are the answer to all of the ACA’s ills. They could also be the future, in their view, for the rest of the country.
An executive order President Trump signed last month — the most significant action he has taken on health care reform since his election — directs several agencies to find ways to encourage similar kinds of plans, including short-term policies that can deny people with preexisting conditions and association health plans that will be subject to far less regulatory oversight.
Democrats vilify these kinds of plans and some of the practices Farm Bureau engages in. They say people like Yates should have the same access as everyone else. And they think separating healthy and sick
