The administration is poised to issue a proposed regulation to try to stabilize insurance markets, and House Republicans are drafting legislation with a similar purpose. The regulation and the bills are intended to hold down insurance premiums and to lure insurers back into the public marketplaces from which they have withdrawn in the past couple of years.
The Republican proposals address concerns that insurers have been expressing for several years, among them what they call costly abuse of special enrollment periods. But markets could still be undermined, insurers say, if Congress simultaneously repeals the health law’s requirement for most Americans to have coverage.
That requirement, known as the individual mandate, is one of the more unpopular features of the law, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama. But insurance companies like it because it requires people to buy their product, bringing in healthy people who pay premiums and do not use much care.
Analyzing the Republican strategy, Joel L. Michaels, a health lawyer at the firm McDermott Will & Emery, said there was “a tension” between efforts to repeal the health law and shore up its insurance marketplaces, where more than 10 million people obtained coverage last year.
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