Christine Jordan Sexton
Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater said on Wednesday that the Florida should get back in the business of regulating health insurance rates.
“I think we do need to take ownership,” Atwater said at the Associated Press Planning Session when asked if the health insurance rates should be regulated at the state level.
The Florida Legislature passed a bill in 2013 that –in part — repeals state review of health insurance policies in effect after March 2010, when provisions of the Affordable Care Act started taking effect. It required insurers to detail to customers why the policies went up using a standardized form approved by the Florida Cabinet.
Whether Florida should tap into available Medicaid dollars to expand health care to working poor Floridians or take steps to operate its own health insurance exchange are issues the Legislature has grappled with since the federal reform was passed, rejecting both.
“But that doesn’t mean you would forgo the opportunity to look in your state, at your demographic, at a player in your state, at their mission in your state as to the audience they are going to be building and the portfolio they are going to be creating,” Atwater said, adding “we should still taken ownership of what rate I am going to be holding a player accountable for charging a customer in my state.”
The ban on rate approval is repealed March 1 and the Florida Legislature would have to pass another law to keep it intact.
The bill passed the Legislature in 2013 and was the center of partisan bickering. U.S. Senator Bill Nelson wrote a letter to Gov. Rick Scott asking him to veto the measure, sponsored by Sen. David Simmons (R-Altamonte Springs.)
He also wrote an opinion piece published in newspapers saying the bill was harmful to Floridians and a move by partisans in the Legislature to sabotage the federal health care law.
Nelson –who served as Florida’s insurance commissioner in the mid 1990s — said Florida had some of the toughest rate regulations in the country. “I know that eliminating the commissioner’s authority to turn down rate increases is unbelievable and unconscionable. Florida had some of the strongest protections in the country, and to take them away like this makes absolutely no sense.”
