OVERNIGHT HEALTH: Healthcare cuts canceled after Dem complaints

The Obama administration announced Monday that planned cuts to Medicare Advantage would not go through as anticipated amid election-year opposition from congressional Democrats.

The cuts would have reduced benefits that seniors receive from healthcare plans in the program, which is intended as an alternative to Medicare.

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Under cuts planned by the administration, insurers offering the plans were to see their federal payments reduced by 1.9 percent, which likely would have necessitated cuts for customers.

Instead, the administration said the federal payments to insurers will increase next year by .4 percent.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services on Monday said changes in the healthcare market meant it did not need to make those cuts to Medicare Advantage this year.

Jonathan Easley at The Hill reports.

Not a fix: An aide to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wrote a blog post late Sunday defending GOP support for an ObamaCare fix that went largely unnoticed when it passed the House last month. The clarification came after the influential conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report led its website with the headline: “Republicans Expand ObamaCare?” Jonathan Easley at The Hill reports.

Unhappy: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel lashed out at an interviewer over an ObamaCare question he didn’t like. In an interview published Monday, The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner asked the former White House chief of staff if he wished he’d been in Washington to help fix HealthCare.gov, when the website crashed at launch. Jonathan Easley at The Hill reports.

2008: The United States’s uninsured rate is at its lowest level since 2008, according to a survey Gallup released Monday. During the first quarter of this year, the number of people without health insurance dropped to 15.6 percent. Rebecca Shabad at The Hill reports.

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