This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 8th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown. Is Obamacare truly optional?

Since the end of the penalties associated with the individual mandate and new rules governing

short-term health coverage, millions of Americans may soon be able to escape the

anti-market provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

Cato's Michael Cannon discusses what these changes mean for people seeking health coverage.

At the end of 2018, what is going to be the state of the individual market for health insurance?

Well, there have been some big changes that mean that very soon Americans will be able to purchase whatever kind of health insurance

they want without Obamacare obstructing them at all. And that's because Congress repealed the penalty associated with the individual mandate and that repeal will take effect in 2019.

But even more important than that, Congress 20 years ago created an exemption from all federal

regulation for something called short-term limited duration health insurance.

And it turned out that exemption is a lot bigger than anyone realized.

Because what the Trump administration did was they said, look, this exemption,

under the way Congress wrote the statute, is so big that we can have the maximum duration of one of these

short-term limited duration plans be 36 months. So that's, these plans can last up to three years. And then on top of that, if you

want to string multiple consecutive short-term plans together, You can do that. The Obama administration

said you can do that. But what the Trump administration did is it said you can also

tie them together with something called a standalone renewal guarantee.

Now this is a product that United Health Group introduced back in 2008,

United Health Group being one of the largest insurance companies in the country.

And what that does is it's a standalone policy that protects you against your premiums

going up if you get sick.

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