This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 20th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Short-term health insurance is exempt from almost all federal regulation,

so why are these plans under threats? You can blame competitors that do face

more federal regulation. Plaintiffs in a new federal lawsuit want these plans

effectively to go away that would harm consumers according to Cato's Michael Cannon we

discussed the case and what it might mean for insurance coverage so the

Cato Institute recently filed an amicus brief in a case called Association of Community Affiliated Health Plan v Treasury.

That's a very boring name for a very interesting case.

It's a case brought by some health plans that participate in the Affordable Care Act's exchanges

in order to overturn a rule that the Trump administration issued in 2018 that grants much more flexibility to these

plans competitors.

See what happened was even though Congress created the Affordable Care Act in 2010

and enacted all these health insurance regulations that are supposed to make

health care more affordable and improve the quality of health insurance and so forth.

These regulations are very expensive.

Congress left in place an exemption from all federal health insurance regulation

that had been on the books for you know more than 20 years for something called

short-term limited duration insurance.

This is a category of health insurance that is totally exempt from federal health insurance regulation.

And people noticed after the Affordable Care Act took effect that a lot of consumers were trying to avoid the Affordable Care Act's very expensive regulations by purchasing short-term plans that cost maybe 50 maybe 70% less that had broader networks of

hospitals and doctors because precisely because it was exempt from all of these regulations.

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