Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Credit: Paul
Sen. Rand Paul is heating up efforts to help self-employed people and small employers join together to buy health coverage.
The Kentucky Republican has introduced a Senate version of the "Association Health Plans Act" bill.
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Congress has not yet added the text to the official legislation database entry, but a draft posted by Rand shows that the AHPs created by the bill would be open to associations that had existed for at least two years and served a purpose other than simply providing health benefits.
The AHP could not discriminate against applicants or enrollees based on their health status.
The bill appears to be similar to a "health marketplace pool" bill Rand introduced in November and almost identical to an AHP bill that Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, introduced in April.
Related: Sen. Rand Paul's new bill would allow 'super' association health plans
Paul's bill has one cosponsor, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.
Walberg's bill has 13 cosponsors. All of the cosponsors for Walberg's bill are Republicans.
The backdrop: AHP bills could help employers or others get around federal rules that now put tight restrictions on efforts by individuals and employers to team up to buy health coverage.
Some commercial health insurers and regulators worry that poorly designed AHP programs could destabilize the existing fully insured group health insurance market, by causing good risks to flow away from fully insured plans and poor risks to flow toward fully insured plans.
But Christopher Condeluci, a legal advisor to AssociationHealthPlans.com, says that there has never been any evidence that access to association plans affects the fully insured market.
The flexibility of AHPs should make them more attractive to high-risk individuals and groups, and that ought to counteract any tendency for low AHP costs to attract low-risk individuals and groups away from the fully insured market, Condeluci says.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
