Trump Rescinds Biden-Era Supplemental Health Benefits Notice Requirement

President Donald Trump gave issuers of critical illness insurance, hospital indemnity insurance and other forms of fixed-indemnity health insurance benefits a boost Monday.

The new Trump administration killed an effort by President Joe Biden to rein in fixed-indemnity health insurance products by requiring marketers to include a standard disclaimer warning consumers about the differences between fixed-indemnity health insurance policies and major medical insurance policies.

The warning notice requirement that was canceled affected all forms of fixed-indemnity health insurance benefits, including critical illness insurance, cancer insurance, hospital indemnity insurance and accident indemnity insurance.

The provision eliminating the old notice requirement was part of a new executive order rescinding dozens of Biden’s executive orders, including executive orders that refer to Medicare or the Affordable Care Act.

The backdrop: The Affordable Care Act keeps health insurers from considering when people are healthy or sick when deciding whether to sell people major medical insurance or how much to charge them for coverage.

The ACA includes a provision exempting fixed-indemnity health insurance and short-term health insurance from the ACA underwriting, pricing and benefits design rules.

Supporters of the “excepted benefits” products say they help patients fill in the obvious gaps in major medical insurance, by helping the patients pay deductibles, copayments and coinsurance bills.

Supplemental health insurance can also help people fighting serious illnesses, such as cancer, cope with extra travel expenses, extra child care expenses and other extra illness-related expenses that may not be covered by even the most generous major medical insurance plan, supporters say.

But patient and consumer groups, and some health insurers, have argued that too many insurers and brokers have marketed supplemental health benefits as bare-bones alternatives to major medical insurance and, in some cases, could be luring enough good risks out of the fully insured small-group market to hurt the small-group market.

The regulatory machinery: Trump’s latest move is the latest chapter in the fixed-indemnity health saga.

Former President Barack Obama used executive orders to restrict fixed-indemnity health insurance and short-term health insurance.

Trump issued an executive order canceling Obama-era restrictions and supporting the products during his first term in the White House.

In 2021, Biden rescinded the Trump-era executive order in Executive Order 14009.

Biden administration officials later used Executive Order 14009 to justify the regulations that imposed the standard disclaimer notice requirements on sellers of all forms of fixed-indemnity health insurance benefits.

A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a ruling blocking the notice requirement in December 2024.

Other Trump administration moves: The same Trump administration executive order rescinding Biden-era Executive Order 14009 appears to eliminate or weaken Biden-era efforts to cap the length of short-term health insurance policies at 90 days.

Another section in the Trump administration order, which blocks Biden-era Executive Order 14087, cancels an effort to let the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, experiment with ways to improve the prescription drug movement.

The CMS projects all involved efforts to improve prescription drug purchasing at Medicare and Medicaid. One project that could have affected the employee benefits market would have used Medicare money to give developers of urgently needed drugs a financial incentive to get the drugs through the government drug approval process as quickly as possible.

Trump also rescinded several Biden-era executive orders that the Biden administration used to launch social distancing, masking, vaccination and emergency health program flexibility efforts during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a separate executive order, Trump started the process of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization.

Another Trump administration regulatory freeze executive order could kill or suspend implementation of some recently adopted health insurance regulations, such as the new mental health parity “non-quantitative treatment limits” regulations, which are supposed to govern rules related to mental health benefits provisions other than limits on how much a plan will spend on mental health claims or how much mental health care a patient can get during a year.

 

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