Stevens Votes to Make Health Care & Prescription Drugs More Affordable

WASHINGTON, DC — As Michiganders face both the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting severe economic downturn, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (MI-11) voted to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Enhancement Act, a legislative package that will provide much needed relief by making health care and prescription drugs more affordable. The legislation also expands access to health care, strengthens protections for people with pre-existing conditions, reduces racial and ethnic health coverage disparities and reverses the Trump Administration’s harmful actions to sabotage the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Enhancement Act makes health care more affordable by lowering health insurance premiums with strengthened and expanded affordability assistance. Specifically, the legislation expands eligibility for premium tax credits beyond 400 percent of the federal poverty line.  The legislation creates a national reinsurance program to help cover the costs of consumers with expensive medical conditions, which helps lower premiums, and provides funds to states to help lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for everyone.

The legislation also makes prescription drugs more affordable by empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and making those prices available to Americans with private health insurance.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that drugs subject to negotiation will see price reductions of up to 55 percent.  

“As Michiganders face a global pandemic, it is more important than ever to defend and strengthen the Affordable Care Act,” said Congresswoman Stevens. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Enhancement Act will lower health costs and prescription drug prices, expand coverage, and strengthen protections for people with pre-existing conditions. While the Trump Administration pushes to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, I am proud to support this pragmatic legislation to make health care more affordable for middle class families.”

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Enhancement Act also:

• reverses the Trump Administration’s efforts to give states waivers to undermine pre-existing condition protections and weaken standards for essential health benefits;
• stops the expansion of junk insurance plans that allow insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions and put consumers at financial risk;
• restores critical outreach and enrollment funding that has been gutted by the Trump Administration and provide funding for navigators to assist consumers in signing up for health care;  
• combats the maternal mortality epidemic, which continues to particularly impact Black and Native American people, by extending Medicaid or Children‘s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) coverage to new mothers from the current 60 days post-partum to one year;
• protects vulnerable populations from losing health coverage by ensuring that Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries receive a full 12 months of coverage once enrolled, protecting them from interruptions due to fluctuations in their income throughout the year.

A one-page summary is available HERE.

A section-by-section is available HERE.

###