Summary
Senate Republicans spent significant time last week discussing their plans to amend or rewrite the American Health Care Act (AHCA), and one emerging idea has shown some potential to take hold: automatically enrolling people in a basic health plan. The policy could vastly reduce the number individuals expected to lose coverage under the House-passed version of the bill (an estimated 24 million over 10 years), and has some surprising conservative bona fides – Secretary Tom Price included a version of auto-enrollment in a bill he authored, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) had it in a 2009 proposal, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has been aggressively pushing the policy. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) also include auto-enrollment as a state option in their more moderate healthcare plan.