Elizabeth Warren, who rose to the top with big liberal bets, is banking a big slice of her presidential run on full-throated support for Medicare for All.
Why it matters: Warren is taking a beating on social media after claiming middle class Americans won’t pay higher taxes to fund health care coverage fully paid for by taxpayers, according to data from NewsWhip provided exclusively to Axios. At the same time, her poll numbers nationally are slipping.
https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2019/11/01/Elizabeth-Warren-s-205-Trillion-Plan-Fund-Medicare-All
Elizabeth Warren on Friday detailed how she intends to pay for Medicare for All without raising costs for middle-class households. The senator from Massachusetts said her plan will cover everyone in the country without raising overall spending, “while putting $11 trillion back in the pockets of the American people by eliminating premiums and virtually eliminating out-of-pocket costs.”
Warren’s plan relies in large part on redirecting existing spending toward a universal, federal health care system, while adding new revenues from taxes on the wealthy, the financial sector and large corporations. “We can generate almost half of what we need to cover Medicare for All just by asking employers to pay slightly less than what they are projected to pay today, and through existing taxes,” Warren said.
Some key details from the Warren plan:
Much lower cost estimate: Warren starts with the Urban Institute’s estimate that the federal government would need $34 trillion more over 10 years to pay for Medicare for All, but she slices that number dramatically — down to $20.5 trillion — by using existing federal and state spending on programs including Medicaid to fund a portion of her proposal, along with larger assumed savings produced by a streamlined system paying lower rates to hospitals, doctors and other health care providers.
Total health care spending stays about the same: Warren projects about $52 trillion in national health care spending over 10 years, close to estimates for the existing system, despite covering more people and offering more generous benefits, including long-term care, audio, vision and dental benefits. Applying Medicare payment levels across the health care system is projected to produce substantial savings that would be used to finance the expanded size and scope of the plan.
Heavy reliance on employer funding: The employer contribution to Medicare for All is pegged at $8.8 trillion, with employers required to contribute to the federal government 98% of what they would pay in employee premiums. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt.
Public spending continues: State and local governments would be still on the hook for the $6 trillion they currently spend on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and public employee premiums.
New taxes on the wealthy: Warren proposes a new 3% tax on household wealth over $1 billion — and that’s on top of her proposed wealth tax, which calls for a separate 3% tax on wealth over $1 billion (and a 2% tax on wealth between $50 million and $1 billion). Combined with an annual capital gains tax on the top 1% of households, her proposal projects that the new health-care-focused wealth taxes would produce $3 trillion.
Taxes on business and finance: Warren says she can raise $3.8 trillion through “targeted” taxes on big business and financial transactions, including a financial transaction tax of .01% on the sale of stocks, bonds and derivatives.
Reduced tax evasion: Cracking down on tax evasion is projected to bring in $2.3 trillion. “The federal government has a nearly 15% ‘tax gap’ between what it collects in taxes what is actually owed because of systematic under-enforcement of our tax laws, tax evasion, and fraud,” Warren said. “By investing in stronger enforcement and adopting best practices on tax reporting, withholding, and filing, experts predict that we can close the tax gap by a third.”
Revenue increase from higher take-home pay: Employees would no longer pay premiums for health insurance, providing a pay hike and higher tax revenues, estimated to total $1.4 trillion.
Abolishing the Overseas Contingency Operations fund: Warren is calling for reduced military spending, with a focus on what some call the “slush fund” that covers the cost of overseas military operations. Eliminating this off-budget spending is projected to save $800 billion.
Immigration reform: Expanded legal immigration would bring in $400 billion in revenue as more incomes are subject to taxes, Warren says.
A record tax cut? Once the new revenues and cost savings are added up, Warren says her plan will deliver what amounts to an historic tax cut. “No middle class tax increases. $11 trillion in household expenses back in the pockets of American families. That’s substantially larger than the largest tax cut in American history.”
Warren won plaudits from some analysts and policy wonks for releasing a plan, but the details she laid out are also being picked apart by critics and rivals, with some experts already expressing doubts about her assumptions and numbers. Here’s some of the reaction:
Congratulations from a conservative: “Kudos to Senator Warren for actually releasing a plan,” said Scott Greenberg, formerly an analyst with the right-leaning Tax Foundation. “There are a lot of things in here that will draw attacks from the left and from the right, and it might have been politically easier not to release it at all. But Warren has stuck by her commitment to explain her proposals.”
Criticism from a key rival: “The mathematical gymnastics in this plan are all geared towards hiding a simple truth from voters: it’s impossible to pay for Medicare for All without middle class tax increases,” said Kate Bedingfield, deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden. Bedingfield argued that employees would end up paying the tax on employers.
Dire warnings from the White House: “It is the middle class who would have to pay the extra $100 billion or more to finance this kind of socialist government takeover of health care,” said Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic adviser. “It would have a catastrophic effect on the economy and all these numbers that we’re seeing, all these numbers, on incomes per household, on wage increases, on jobs, all these numbers would literally evaporate and by the by, so would the stock market.”
Tax vs. premium: Warren’s plan will likely kick off a debate about the difference between taxes and health care premiums, and whether that difference matters, says William Gale of the Brookings Institution. “Does [the Warren plan] raise ‘taxes’ on the middle class?,” Gale asked Friday. “Short answer — it does not raise ‘burdens’ on the middle class.”
Cost reduction is crucial: “The key to Warren’s plan for financing Medicare for all is aggressively constraining prices paid to hospitals, physicians, and drug companies. We’d still have the most expensive health system in the world, but it would be less expensive than it is now,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Warren’s plan to aggressively constrain health care prices under Medicare for all would be quite disruptive. On the other hand, every other developed country has managed to figure it out, so we know it’s possible.”
And the battle is ultimately political: “In laying out the specifics of her Medicare for all plan, Warren’s challenge is more about politics than arithmetic,” Levitt continued. “She is taking on the wealthy, corporations, and pretty much every part of the health care and insurance industries. Those are some powerful enemies.”
So don’t expect major legislation soon: “Experts will argue for months whether [Warren is] being too optimistic — whether her cost estimates are too low and her revenue estimates too high, whether we can really do this without middle-class tax hikes,” said economist Paul Krugman. “You might say that time will tell, but it probably won’t: Even if Warren becomes president, and Dems take the Senate too, it’s very unlikely that Medicare for all will happen any time soon.”
Bernie Sanders often points to Canada and Europe as models for universal health care coverage.
There has been confusion over estimates, like ours, that measure the effect of single-payer (i.e., Medicare for All) proposals on both federal spending and total national health spending.
The two are not the same, and too frequently, people use estimates of both and make misleading apples-to-oranges comparisons.
Federal health care spending is the money the federal government spends on health care, whereas national health spending includes all health spending, regardless of who pays for it.
Federal health care spending includes spending on Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance program, Affordable Care Act Marketplace premium subsidies, the Veterans Administration, US Department of Defense health care programs, support for health care professionals and hospitals providing uncompensated care, as well as other federal programs.
Changes in federal health spending represent amounts that would either need to be added to the federal budget (and funded through tax increases or additional government debt) or which would lead to cuts in other federal programs to free up sufficient federal funds.
National health care spending includes spending by the federal government, state and local governments, households, and employers. National health expenditures (NHE) are estimated annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as the National Health Expenditure Accounts. Using our models’ projections and extending the CMS’s estimate for spending categories we do not model, we estimate that NHE for the 10-year period from 2020 to 2029 will total approximately $52 trillion dollars under current law.
It is possible, for example, for federal spending to increase while national health spending decreases, if new federal programs take over some of the expenses currently paid for by employers and households and do it at a lower cost.
But if a federal program takes over some of the private spending and ends up providing more generous benefits, total national spending could still increase. Regardless, it is important to separate changes in federal spending from changes in national spending to understand the implications of any health care reform approach.
In our most recent report, we estimate that a broad single-payer reform (referred to as Reform 8: Enhanced Single Payer in the report) would increase federal government spending by $34 trillion over the 2020–29 period, $34 trillion beyond what the federal government already spends on health care.
However, this reform would shift almost all of the spending currently done by households, employers, and state governments over to the federal government. All people, regardless of whether they have insurance coverage today, would be covered by the new federal program.
Under the single-payer enhanced reform, the new federal government program would provide more covered benefits than typical insurance offers today (including typical medical benefits but adding a new home- and community-based long-term services and supports benefit and adult dental, vision, and hearing benefits). All the costs would be covered by the federal government; no one would pay premiums or out-of-pocket costs (i.e., no deductibles and no copayments or coinsurance), including undocumented residents.
As a result, many people would get insurance for the first time, and many others would get significantly more generous insurance than they currently have. And with their new or improved insurance, many people would use more medical care than they do today.
The federal government would limit the fees paid to doctors, hospitals, and prescription drug manufacturers, which would help lower the program’s costs, compared with what it would be otherwise. In addition, the system would be simpler than our current “patchwork” system, so the administrative costs of running the program would be lower than in most private insurance plans; this also helps offset some of the new costs.
However, by our estimates, the increase in spending for people with this new generous coverage would outweigh the savings from lower prices for health care providers and lower administrative costs. As a result, total national spending would increase, even taking into account greatly reduced household, employer, and state government spending.
For this approach to reform, federal spending would increase by $34 trillion over 10 years, but health spending by individuals, employers, and state governments would decrease by $27 trillion, so national health spending would increase by $7 trillion over the same 10-year period, from $52 to $59 trillion.
The figure below illustrates our estimates. In the first bar, we divide the $52 trillion estimated current-law spending on health care over 2020–29 into three pieces: $17 trillion in federal spending; $27 trillion in private spending and state and local government spending for medical care and dental care that would be subsumed into the new single-payer program; and $8 trillion in spending (a mix of government and private spending) that would not be affected by a single-payer program.
The $8 trillion includes costs associated with an array of expenses, such as medical care for members of the military and their families while military members are deployed, services provided to foreign visitors, acute care provided to people living in institutions (e.g., prisons and nursing homes), and the value of new construction and equipment put in place by the medical sector. This spending also includes long-term services and supports by states and individuals that would continue under reform. For our purposes here, we refer to this $8 trillion in spending as “spending not affected by single-payer.”
The taller second bar shows that the total national spending under a single-payer program would be higher than under current law. The $17 trillion in federal spending under current law would be shifted to help fund the new program, and the federal government would take over the $27 trillion in current health care spending by employers, households, and state and local governments.
Fully funding a new single-payer program would require an additional $7 trillion in federal spending beyond that repurposed $44 trillion. The $8 trillion in spending not affected by the single-payer program would continue to be funded by a mix of government and private sources.
Thus, it is not appropriate to compare an estimated increase in federal spending of $34 trillion over 10 years with a current-law level of national health spending of $52 trillion over the same period and conclude these are savings in national health spending.
And although many advocates believe that a single-payer system would increase federal spending but with the benefit of reducing national health spending, our estimates contradict that. According to our analysis, a broad single-payer reform, similar to current Medicare for All bills, would increase federal spending and increase national spending.
But as our full report also shows, a single-payer program can be designed to decrease national health spending, as can other approaches to achieving universal coverage.
How can the United States better control its health care costs and quality and still achieve universal coverage? The strongest choice is not Medicare for All, which would eliminate private insurance; it’s the public option, which would allow people to choose from Medicare or private insurers. But the public option can only succeed in controlling costs and quality and achieving universal coverage if it is implemented without the financing gimmicks that characterize Medicare.
In this article, we define the principles that can make the public option the legitimate and powerful competitor to private insurance firms and how this competition would expand access and improve cost and quality. But first we’ll clarify how extremely important the universal coverage is.
Universal Health Care Coverage: Life and Death Politics
Universal health care coverage is central to the physical, fiscal, and political well-being of a nation. Nowhere is that more evident than in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, which still has 28.3 million people without health insurance. Americans have literally died, gone bankrupt, become disabled, and stayed in dead-end jobs that offer insurance. And yet, despite the lack of universal coverage, the United States spends more as a percentage of GDP than any other nation and its quality of care is erratic. Even with its world-class resources and medical technology, it ranks the lowest among developed nations in avoiding preventable deaths.
Universal coverage has a long history in other developed countries. It began as primarily employer-based health insurance coverage in the 1880s in Germany, morphed into government-backed universal coverage in England in 1948, marched across Western and Eastern Europe in the ensuing 25 years, and then into Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Canada, making the United States the exception among developed countries. Finally, after 65 years and 12 presidents, the United States passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 to significantly reduce the 45 million Americans who did not have insurance.
The passage of the legislation was hard fought and its results, nine years later, are mixed. On the plus side, the ACA insured more than 20 million additional Americans, lowering the percentage of the U.S. population that was uninsured from 17% in 2008 to 10% in 2016, and fewer people have suffered financial shocks since being insured through the ACA. Although the data are early, it may help make Americans healthier.
But there are negatives too. The ACA’s slogan, “if you like your plan or doctor, you can keep it,” proved to be false for many. And 14.7 million of the more than 20 million were insured through Medicaid, the U.S. health insurance for the indigent, which the important Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found had no effect on health status (but it did have a positive effect on self-reported mental health status). Health care remains unaffordable to millions: Premiums for insurance purchased on ACA-related exchanges rose by a staggering 26%, which helps explain why unsubsidized enrollment declined by 2.5 million people between 2017 and 2018. Those newly insured who were not covered by Medicaid faced ACA policies with substantial deductibles of at least $1,400 for an individual or $2,800 for a family. Finally, the small numbers of insurers that agreed to participate in the ACA had little incentive to compete on price, lower out-of-pocket costs, or by offering a broad choice of providers.
So what the United States needs, and Americans want, are lower premiums and out-of-pocket costs for health care, a sufficient number of competitive private insurers to honor the promise “if you like your plan or doctor, you can keep it,” and, as surveys reveal, no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime limits on benefits, and coverage for children up to age 26 on parents’ insurance.
The Medicare for All option, which would eliminate all private insurers, is clearly not the answer Americans want. They do not want to lose their private health insurance to a public bureaucracy or to pay its $3.2 trillion annual price tag in the form of higher taxes.
How the Public Option Can Cure the U.S. Health Care System
The aim of improving health care affordability, continued private insurance, and better access to quality providers can be achieved with the public option, but only if it is implemented with rates that reflect realistic underwriting and accurate and fair cost accounting.
The Medicare component of the public option is wildly popular: 85% of Medicare beneficiaries are satisfied with the federal program. And why not? Many doctors accept it, and the beneficiaries pay only a fraction of the cost, passing the rest onto future generations. The U.S. Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, gives away benefits to users whose value substantially exceeds what they pay. Each beneficiary on average receives $310,000 more in benefits than they paid. The unpaid bills — $37 trillion at last count — have been kicked down the road to future generations in the form of bigger federal deficits. The Galen Institute reports that Medicare’s annual deficits are responsible for one-third of U.S. federal debt.
Yet, Medicare’s enormous scale confers genuine administrative and purchasing efficiencies. Medicare spends up to seven times less than private insurers on administrative costs. It also pays hospitals 40% less and providers 2 to 3.5 times less than private insurers do for the same services. Some contend that providers merely shift Medicare and Medicaid’s unpaid charges to private insurers, but that charge has been refuted. Rather, it is plausible that these payments appropriately help to squeeze out the one-third of health care expenditures that many experts view as sheer waste.
The public option can take advantage of these efficiencies but only if it is implemented without the financing gimmicks that have artificially lowered the costs of Medicare at the expense of our progeny and that would allow it to unfairly compete with private insurers.
To assure that all insurers play on a level playing field, public-financing principles must conform to those of private insurers. For one, the public option’s expenses must be financed by current users, not future generations. In other words, it should be pay as you go, just like private insurance. The public option’s accounting also should include all its expenses, such as the unfunded liability for Medicare employees’ post-retirement benefits, which are often buried in some fund other than Medicare’s. It must also account for the cost of the money that American taxpayers and debt holders have invested in building Medicare’s infrastructure, including its buildings, equipment, and workers. After all, private insurers incur costs to build the infrastructure that allows them to market their products; yet, under current accounting practices, Medicare gets these assets for free. To keep it real, expert accountants would routinely audit the public option’s financial statements to certify that its expenses are accurately stated, just as they do for private insurers.
Private insurers will be forced to compete with the public option’s lower costs through improved pricing, service, and quality. They can offer, for example, low-cost policies that transport enrollees from high-cost states to high-quality, low-cost ones such as Utah. Or they can emulate Ashley Furniture’s sending an enrollee to low-cost Mexico for an orthopedic procedure, replete with an American surgeon who was paid three times Medicare’s rate payments to the patient of $5,000 plus all her travel and out-of-pocket costs. (For political reasons, Medicare cannot emulate policies that favor certain states or send its enrollees out of the United States.) To help the private insurers to compete, new legislation should allow bundling of health, life, casualty, disability, and any other products, as well as the ability to sell across state lines. This enhanced competition among insurers and providers would lower costs, thereby increasing access to coverage and likely improving the quality of care.
We personally believe that the United States would be better off emulating three European countries — Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands — which are lauded for the quality of their universal coverage health care systems and yet spend far less on them than the United States. These countries are fiscally much healthier than nations with government-run health insurance systems akin to Medicare for All. But the reality is this model is politically untenable in the United States because it relies entirely on private insurers and would require eliminating highly popular Medicare and giving people vouchers for buying private-insurance policies.
Americans generally like both private insurance and Medicare but universally deplore their costs. Medicare for All eliminates private insurers and increases taxpayers’ burden. The public option keeps private insurers and controls health care costs. However, it will require legislative and governmental administrative backbone and independent oversight to assure that the public option achieves these goals legitimately — without resorting to Medicare’s financing gimmicks.
That’s the argument put forth in Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s new book, “The Triumph of Injustice.” The economists at the University of California at Berkeley, who have advised Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the creation of a wealth tax, call private health insurance costs “taxes in everything but name.” They are automatically deducted from workers’ paychecks. And they are essentially mandatory for families who don’t want to be crippled by long-term health-care costs or unexpected illnesses.
“Whether insurance premiums are paid to a public monopoly (the government) or to a private monopoly (the notoriously uncompetitive US private health insurance system) makes little difference,” the economists write. “Both payments reduce the take-home pay of workers; and although it’s always possible to evade taxes or to refuse to pay one thin dime to insurance companies, in practice almost everyone abides.”
The issue sparked a spirited discussion during Tuesday’s debate in Ohio for the 12 Democrats vying to take on President Trump in 2020, with Warren and Sanders’s plans getting blasted as being overly expensive and unworkable. Warren was specifically called out for refusing to say whether her proposal would result in higher taxes for the middle class or get into how it would eliminate employer-sponsored coverage for 160 million Americans. Although she vowed that her plan would not raise overall costs for the middle class, she notably evaded the specific issue of taxes.
Saez and Zucman have produced an estimate of just how much we’re already paying for health insurance and find it’s a little north of $1 trillion per year: “close to 6% of national income in 2019 — the equivalent of one-third of all federal income tax payments!” Health insurance costs raise the average effective tax rate on American labor from 29 percent to 37 percent, they said.
Thinking about health-care costs in this way is useful, Saez and Zucman write, because it allows for better tax comparisons between the United States and other wealthy countries, most of which fund health care via their tax codes. “Americans on average keep about the same fraction of their pretax income as their European brethren,” they write.
One of the key uncertainties about transitioning to a Medicare-for-all plan like the ones proposed by Warren and Sanders is whether doing so would raise or lower total health-care costs. Preliminary estimates have so far yielded wildly divergent outcomes, in part, because the financing specifics behind various candidates’ plans are largely still up in the air. How the change would affect the wallet of the typical middle-class tax payer relative to other groups also remains an open question.
But the Saez and Zucman data underscore that Americans already are paying a large health-care levy that is for all intents and purposes mandatory. If you consider health insurance costs as a tax on labor, as they do, it means the extremely rich, who derive most of their income from capital, are carrying a disproportionately light share of the total health cost load.
Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting and Improving Medicare for Our Nation’s Seniors.” The order is the latest example of how Trump says one thing while doing another. Rather than strengthening Medicare, Trump envisions turning large swaths of the 54-year-old program for the elderly over to the private sector while directing the federal government to dismantle safeguards on seniors’ health care access, shift costs onto beneficiaries, and limit seniors’ choice of providers.
Among other things, the executive order lays out a path to:
President Trump rolled out the executive order in a speech at a retirement community in Florida, during which he echoed his administration’s previous attacks on progressive health reform proposals by referring to them as “Medicare for None.” In fact, several recent congressional proposals would offer new choices for coverage, expand the benefits of insurance, and strengthen Medicare benefits for the elderly. Unlike these Medicare for All-type proposals, Trump’s plan fails to address some more common problems in Medicare, such as high out-of-pocket costs or difficulties navigating Medicare Advantage networks.
Today, about one-third of seniors are enrolled in private plans through Medicare Advantage; the other two-thirds are in traditional, fee-for-service Medicare. The share of beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage has grown over the past two decades. Medicare Advantage attracts a relatively healthier, less expensive pool of enrollees than that of traditional Medicare, and its per-beneficiary spending is lower. Some of that difference is attributable to lower health care utilization, although local market conditions and beneficiary health status also contribute. A number of studies have shown how Medicare Advantage plans profit from selection by attracting relatively healthier enrollees while also gaming the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) risk adjustment program to make their enrollees appear sicker. Medicare Advantage plans also enjoy distinct advantages over the traditional Medicare program, including integrated plan designs and the ability to avoid providers involved in graduate medical education.
Last week’s executive order emphasizes so-called market-based approaches, signaling that President Trump envisions an even bigger role for the private sector in Medicare. In fact, Trump has already taken steps to accelerate enrollment in private plans. Last year, the administration bombarded beneficiaries with email messages promoting Medicare Advantage to such an extent that one former CMS official described the effort as “more like Medicare Advantage plan advertising than objective information from a public agency.”
The executive order directs the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ensure that traditional Medicare “is not advantaged or promoted over [Medicare Advantage] with respect to its administration.” For example, one way the administration could nudge more enrollees into Medicare Advantage would be to further relax CMS guidelines governing how plans market to beneficiaries. A more aggressive tactic to shift enrollees into private plans would be to make Medicare Advantage, rather than the traditional Medicare program, the default for more seniors. While auto-enrollment could result in lower costs for some beneficiaries, others could find themselves stuck in plans with limited networks or insufficient coverage for services they need. In addition, studies of the private drug plans offered through Medicare Part D have shown that seniors find it cumbersome to switch plans, even when the one they have is not the best value.
CMS’ existing Medicare Advantage auto-enrollment mechanism, though limited to a small subset of beneficiaries, caused enough problems that the agency suspended expansion of the process in 2016. In some instances, beneficiaries subject to “seamless conversion,” which allows insurance companies to auto-enroll their marketplace or Medicaid customers into Medicare Advantage, were unaware what type of Medicare coverage they had until they were assigned a new primary care doctor or they already had received out-of-network care. Even if a future Trump administration plan allowed people automatically enrolled in Medicare Advantage to opt back into traditional Medicare, the switch could cause seniors to miss enrollment deadlines for private Medigap plans. Unable to obtain supplemental benefits for traditional Medicare coverage, those people would effectively be stuck in Medicare Advantage.
Another part of the order asks the HHS secretary to align Medicare’s reimbursement rates with the prices paid by Medicare Advantage plans and commercial insurers. Broad application of market-based pricing in Medicare could raise expenses for beneficiaries and taxpayers and drain the Medicare trust fund: Bloated provider rates for commercial insurance show that the market does not work in patients’ interests and cannot be trusted to ensure fair prices. Dominant provider systems leverage their market power to demand prices well above the cost of care. A recent RAND Corporation study found that private insurance typically pays hospitals about 241 percent of Medicare rates, with wide variation across geographic regions. While Medicare Advantage plans’ negotiated rates for individual items or services can be lower or greater than those in the traditional Medicare fee schedule, reimbursement rates in the two programs are generally close, on average. The administratively set rates in Medicare keep the prices for hospital and physician services reasonable not only for traditional Medicare beneficiaries but also for those in Medicare Advantage plans. Allowing traditional Medicare prices to float up toward commercial rates while also delinking Medicare Advantage rates from Medicare rates could cause traditional Medicare premiums and the overall cost of the program to skyrocket and deplete the Medicare trust fund.
The executive order could also give new life to a deeply unpopular, longstanding conservative scheme to privatize Medicare. Under so-called premium support plans, seniors would receive vouchers that they would use to purchase either a private Medicare plan or traditional Medicare. Past premium support proposals differ in how they set the amount of the voucher: Some plans set the voucher amount arbitrarily, while others put a thumb on the scale to encourage beneficiaries to choose a private plan.
The executive order calls for using Medicare Advantage negotiated rates to set traditional Medicare rates and instructs the HHS secretary to develop a transition plan to adopting “true market-based pricing” for the traditional Medicare program, including through competitive bidding, which in the past has been a method for setting the voucher amount. Traditional Medicare—saddled with now-higher costs—would have to bid against private Medicare plans in order to compete for beneficiaries. Past premium support plans would then cap the yearly growth of the voucher, and as costs exceeded those caps, Medicare beneficiaries would pay a greater share of the costs of the program over time.
The executive order also directs the HHS secretary to “identify and remove unnecessary barriers to private contracts.” Today, Medicare protects beneficiaries from surprise medical bills by limiting the amount that doctors who see Medicare beneficiaries can charge these patients. Physicians may opt out of the Medicare program and enter into private contracts that set higher prices than Medicare will pay; in these cases, the patient is responsible for the entire billed amount. However, less than 1 percent of doctors have chosen to opt out of the program, in large part because Medicare’s rules protect consumers from these arrangements.
For example, doctors must give Medicare beneficiaries written notice that they have opted out of Medicare, and the patient must sign the document acknowledging that they understand they are responsible for paying the entire charge. Doctors may not enter into private contracts with patients who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid or with patients experiencing a medical emergency. In addition, if a physician opts out of the Medicare program, they must do so entirely instead of cherry-picking beneficiaries or services. The opt-out period is a minimum of two years. Together, these limits protect beneficiaries by providing greater certainty about their doctors’ status and avoiding confusion about which visits and services Medicare will reimburse.
Loosening these rules could allow doctors to more easily circumvent Medicare consumer protections; opt out of Medicare; and charge higher prices to Medicare patients, who have lower incomes and greater health needs than privately insured individuals, on average. While wealthy beneficiaries might benefit from expanded access to nonparticipating providers, higher private prices could make it difficult for most Medicare patients to keep their doctors or afford to see other providers. Nevertheless, Trump’s first HHS secretary, Tom Price, sponsored legislation to permit private contracting and supported allowing doctors to balance bill Medicare beneficiaries.
During his Florida speech, Trump asked the crowd, “You want to keep your doctors, right?” Yet his order calls for changes that could restrict Medicare beneficiaries’ choice of doctors by favoring Medicare Advantage plans and by tinkering with the CMS network adequacy standards for those plans.
From a beneficiary perspective, a distinguishing feature of Medicare Advantage is that plans typically have restrictive provider networks. Under the Trump proposal, the network adequacy standards would take into account state laws affecting provider competition and the availability of telehealth services. If these changes lower the bar for Medicare Advantage plans and allow plans to include even fewer doctors in a particular area, a position the Trump administration has previously supported, they could make it harder for seniors to schedule in-person visits or see the provider of their choice. They could also increase costs for beneficiaries who need to see out-of-network specialists.
Lower-cost, narrower network plans could profit by cream-skimming healthier seniors because healthy individuals benefit most from the trade-off between lower premiums and fewer providers. Enrollees in traditional Medicare, including seniors who need the broad provider access that only traditional Medicare offers, could see their premiums rise as a result of a sicker risk pool and imperfect risk adjustment.
If networks become narrower, it may be increasingly hard for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries to identify and schedule visits with providers included in their plans. Moreover, online provider directories for Medicare Advantage are already filled with inaccuracies. A 2018 CMS report found that 45 percent of directories had inaccurate location information for providers. The CMS audit also found that 221 providers who were listed as in-network were not accepting new Medicare Advantage patients. This lack of accurate information, combined with Medicare Advantage’s relatively weak network adequacy standards, means that the Trump plan’s changes to the program could decrease, rather than increase, choice for seniors.
The executive order proposes wider access to Medicare Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs), which are available to those enrolled in high-deductible Medicare Advantage plans. Like health savings accounts (HSAs), the money in MSAs is tax-free and can be used toward health care costs, including dental, hearing, and vision. While high-deductible health plans and MSAs can be a good value for relatively healthy seniors who have high enough incomes to afford to fund these accounts, they may not provide adequate financial protection for those who need first-dollar coverage or have greater health needs.
President Trump has previously proposed turning MSAs into a tax shelter, which would chiefly benefit the wealthy. Trump’s FY 2020 budget proposed allowing seniors to deposit additional funds into MSAs beyond the plan’s contribution, as they can with HSAs. Data on HSA contributions show that higher-income individuals are more likely to contribute toward accounts and to benefit more from the tax exemption.
A glaring omission in the president’s plan is any provision to directly take on one of seniors’ widespread concerns: the high cost of health care. Although Americans have overwhelmingly favorable experiences with the existing Medicare program, it is far from perfect. According to a report from the Commonwealth Fund, about 1 in 4 Medicare beneficiaries is underinsured, meaning their out-of-pocket health care costs are 10 percent or more of their income. A 2011 analysis by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) found that Medicare beneficiaries without supplemental plans, also known as “medigap” coverage, paid 12 percent of their medical costs out of pocket, on average.
For example, traditional Medicare has no limit on out-of-pocket costs. By contrast, the CMS limits out-of-pocket costs in Medicare Advantage to $6,700 for in-network services, and many individual plans offer lower out-of-pocket limits. In 2012, the MedPAC commissioners voted unanimously to recommend that Congress rework Medicare’s benefit design to include an out-of-pocket maximum. Doing so would give Medicare beneficiaries better financial protection against high health care costs.
President Trump claims that his executive order protects Medicare from “destruction.” In fact, not only would recent prominent Medicare for All and public option reforms proposed in Congress maintain the benefits of the existing Medicare program for seniors, but many also lay out improvements to the program in recognition of its shortcomings. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (D-VT) Medicare for All bill would almost immediately add an out-of-pocket limit for seniors in Medicare parts A and B. The Medicare for America Act, sponsored by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), would also add out-of-pocket limits and strengthen Medicare Advantage network adequacy standards. And multiple proposals have provisions to lower beneficiaries’ prescription drug costs; eliminate the two-year waiting period for nonelderly disabled people; and add hearing, dental, and vision coverage to standard Medicare benefits.
President Trump has laid out a plan to privatize Medicare and undermine the program, breaking his promise that “no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits.” Furthermore, he is trying to scare seniors away from supporting congressional proposals that would genuinely improve Medicare beneficiaries’ access to health care and financial security. Although seniors need better protection against out-of-pocket medical costs and better access to care providers, the changes Trump has proposed will only make things worse.
President Trump and senior officials in his administration have been signaling for several months that they would release an updated GOP health-care plan, presumably to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — which the president still criticizes as a “disaster.” Last week, the president gave a campaign-style speech denouncing Medicare for All and announcing a new executive order (EO) on improving Medicare. If the EO is the administration’s much-hyped health-care “plan,” it is a surprisingly lightweight offering.
The EO tasks the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and officials in the White House with producing several deliverables focused mainly on expanding options in Medicare Advantage (MA), which is the private insurance alternative to Medicare’s government-managed fee-for-service (FFS) option.
The EO uses general language throughout so it is difficult to know for sure what some of these administrative actions will mean. Overall, however, it is clear that what is called for are steps allowed under current law. As such, the changes are likely to be incremental and gradual.
The most promising proposal might be the push to encourage the payment of cash rebates to beneficiaries selecting low-cost MA options. Today, MA plans compete mainly by offering supplemental benefits beyond what Medicare covers. Cash rebates paid directly to the beneficiaries might usher in more direct price competition among MA plans, and between MA and FFS too.
The benchmarking of FFS rates to those negotiated by MA plans is a particularly obscure recommendation. Most FFS payment rates are grounded in statutory requirements. HHS may not have much authority to unilaterally adjust payments based on what is occurring among MA plans. Further, it is not clear if what the administration has in mind would raise or lower FFS spending.
While some of the concepts in the EO may be helpful, it is hard to see how they will have a dramatic effect on the health system, or on voters’ perception of the health system. The EO does nothing of consequence for Americans who are not enrolled in Medicare, nor does it offer much for 40 million Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in the traditional FFS program.
The EO may signal a play it safe approach by the administration. Instead of offering an actual plan or even just a vision for a reformed system, the administration may have decided that it is better to attack the Democratic party’s ideas rather than offer up a viable alternative course of action. Most of the political attention in 2020 will be focused upon whatever plan is pushed by the winning Democratic candidate anyway (either Medicare for All, or perhaps the introduction of a public option). The Trump administration seems more comfortable attacking either of those ideas than defending a Republican alternative.
That’s not a new development, of course. For years, Republicans have been more willing to state what they are against than what they are for.
But that strategy has its limits. As was demonstrated when the ACA passed in 2010, under the right circumstances, Democrats can pass a health-care bill even when all Republicans vote no. That might happen again, and perhaps soon, if the GOP fails to offer a convincing vision for fixing the problems – most especially rising costs — that concern many voters.
Most Republicans say they want the health system to rely on competition and consumer choice, not government control to discipline costs, but they have only vague ideas of what that would require in practice.
For the market to work, consumers need to be rewarded financially when they migrate to low-cost, high-value health care and away from costly and inefficient alternatives. That does not occur often enough today in large part because, under current law, the federal government provides larger subsidies when consumers in Medicare and job-based health care opt for more expensive coverage. Republicans shy away from fixing these problems because doing so would be politically controversial. Thus, they are left with offering safer, and less consequential, changes that represent modest progress at best.
Attacking Medicare for All or the public option is a short-term political strategy. Over the long run, the best way to beat those ideas is by enacting a viable, market-based reform plan that demonstrates cost discipline is possible without handing over all control to the federal government.
https://www.axios.com/medicare-advantage-tilting-scales-7db28dd2-25af-4283-b971-21a61fa59371.html
Today is the final day when seniors and people with disabilities can sign up for Medicare plans for 2019, and consumer groups are concerned the Trump administration is steering people into privately run Medicare Advantage plans while giving short shrift to their limitations.
Between the lines: Medicare Advantage has been growing like gangbusters for years, and has garnered bipartisan support. But the Center for Medicare Advocacy says the Trump administration is tilting the scales by broadcasting information that “is incomplete and continues to promote certain options over others.”
Medicare overpaid hospitals about $1.3 billion in 2015 for the government’s Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education program, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The Graduate Medical Education rate is $150,000 per resident. While 25 percent of hospitals received less than $106,000 per resident in 2015, 25 percent received more than $182,000 per resident. That same year, nearly half of teaching hospitals got more than $150,000 per resident.
If Medicare GME payments were capped at the $150,000 rate, researchers predict Medicare would save more than $1 billion every year.
“Our study suggests Medicare GME may be overpaying some hospitals up to $1.28 billion annually,” said Candice Chen, MD, lead study author and associate professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington, D.C. “Those funds could be redirected and used to strengthen the physician workforce, especially in underserved areas.”
HENRY KOTULA 