Trump Administration Pushes Conservative Goals in Health-Care Market Changes . Memo mentions letting insurers charge higher premiums to older people.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Trump administration wants any congressional plan to shore up the Affordable Care Act markets to include conservative goals, such as letting insurers charge higher premiums to older people, according to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The memo encourages lawmakers to pass measures including allowing insurers to charge older people five times as much as younger people, expanding access to health savings accounts and increasing the amount of money that people can contribute to them, as well as supporting a permanent congressional appropriation for subsidies to insurance companies who decrease deductibles and copays for lower-income consumers in exchange for explicit exclusions on abortion coverage by those insurers.

The Affordable Care Act currently restricts insurers to charging older buyers three times as much as younger ones, which has checked premiums for 50-somethings and 60-somethings compared with what they might have been otherwise, but which some insurers contend have increased premiums for healthier 20-somethings and 30-somethings to the point that they don’t want to buy coverage, forcing premiums up across the board.

Federal courts are still wrestling with questions over whether insurer subsidies for low-income buyers’ cost-sharing are lawful without an explicit congressional appropriation in the 2010 health law. After months of wrangling, President Donald Trump instructed his administration to stop paying the subsidies, and some insurers that had counted on the subsidies said they would have no choice but to further raise premiums.

The memo is clear that Mr. Trump’s administration will back lawmakers if they opt to fund the payments, but that the administration sides with conservatives insisting that such a move include shields on abortion coverage. Executive orders signed by the Obama administration restrict the ways in which federally subsidized insurance can cover abortion; antiabortion activists have argued that such steps are insufficient unless they are codified.

Will choice in health care expand?