Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich teamed up with moderate Democrat Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado to stabilize Obamacare.
The two establishment governors announced on Monday that they have reached an agreement on a bipartisan solution to stabilize Obamacare.
Kasich and Hickenlooper said last week that their plan could include funding the Obamacare subsidies known as the cost-sharing reduction program. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to eliminate these subsidies for health insurers.
Kasich also said that they could create a government reinsurance program that would allegedly bring down premiums by helping insurers spread the cost of the sickest enrollees on the Obamacare exchanges.
The Ohio governor also suggested that they could relax the Obamacare employer mandate, requiring that employers with a higher number of employees would have to provide health insurance to their full-time workers. Forty moderate House Republicans and Democrats implied that they could include this plan in their stabilization package.
Hickenlooper will testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee next week along with other governors at a hearing about stabilizing Obamacare. Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) previously told Breitbart News that the stabilization package legislation will be simple and bipartisan to garner enough votes to pass through Congress.
Kasich recently denied that he was mulling a 2020 presidential bid with Hickenlooper.
“Chuck, look, Kasich/Hickenlooper. You couldn’t — first of all, you couldn’t pronounce it. And secondly, you couldn’t fit it on a bumper sticker,” Kasich told host of NBC’s Meet the Press Chuck Todd.