Tag Archives: Community Rating Guarantee Issue

Should States Allow Insurers to Offer Bare-Bones Health Plans With Fewer Mandated Benefits?

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Health insurance is complicated. In many states, it’s about to get worse.

Image result for skinny health plans

 

Health insurance is complicated. In many states, it’s about to get worse.

That’s the opening of a piece of mine in the Wall Street Journal (gated, unfortunately) about what states should do in response to the Trump administration’s anticipated relaxation of rules governing short-term plans.

Where states allow short-term plans without restriction, the plans will be a lot cheaper than those sold on the exchanges because they don’t have to comply with the ACA. But that low price comes with big tradeoffs.

Short-term plans don’t have to sell to all comers, nor do they have to cover pre-existing conditions. Sick people will have no real choice but to buy insurance on the exchanges. To cover the medical costs of a relatively sicker group of people, exchange insurers will have to increase their premiums.

People who earn less than four times the poverty level will be shielded from the price increases because the ACA caps premiums at no more than about 10% of income. The federal government, however, has to pick up the rest of the tab-so as prices go up, federal outlays will, too, squandering an estimated $38.7 billion over 10 years.

Hurt worst will be people who earn more than four times the poverty level. Federal actuaries estimate that they’ll pay 6% more on account of the short-term rule by 2022. That will come on top of price increases associated with Congress’s repeal of the individual mandate. In 2019 alone, the Urban Institute predicts that insurance prices will grow, on average, by about 18%.

Beyond that, people who buy short-term plans may be surprised to discover just how stingy they are. Insurance is complicated: people rarely read, much less understand, all the fine print. And there’s a lot of fine print.

Efforts to Undo Pre-Existing Condition Protections Put Millions of Women and Girls at Risk

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https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/news/2018/06/21/452643/moving-backward/

A mother and her child visit the doctor, October 2013.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) prohibits discriminatory insurance practices in pricing and coverage in the individual market. Before the law was enacted, women routinely were denied coverage or charged more for insurance based on so-called pre-existing conditions. For example, in the individual insurance market, a woman could be denied coverage or charged a higher premium if she had been diagnosed with or experienced HIV or AIDS; diabetes; lupus; an eating disorder; or pregnancy or a previous cesarean birth, just to name a few. The ACA provided women with protections for pre-existing conditions and access to comprehensive, affordable, and fair health services.

But recent efforts to eliminate key ACA protections, discussed below, would put millions of women and girls once again at risk of being charged more or denied coverage for individual insurance.

Efforts to eliminate ACA protections threaten the security of women with pre-existing conditions

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice refused to uphold the law in Texas v. United States, when it argued that the community rating and guaranteed issue provisions of the ACA are unconstitutional. Without guaranteed issue, women could be denied coverage based on their medical history, their age, and their occupation, among other factors. Without community rating, women could be charged more, or priced out of the insurance market altogether, based on their health status or other factors. Insurance companies could also try to reinstate gender rating, a common pre-ACA practice in which insurance companies charged women higher premiums than they did men, even though other parts of the ACA protect women from discrimination in the health care system.

Now, think tanks and conservative opponents of the ACA are introducing proposals to repeal the ACA yet again. If implemented, these proposals would similarly put women at risk of being denied coverage or charged more because of their health status.

More than half of all women and girls have pre-existing conditions

The authors estimate that more than half of women and girls nationwide—more than 67 million—have pre-existing conditions. There are also nearly 6 million pregnancies each year, a commonly cited reason for denying women coverage on the individual market before the ACA. The two tables available for download below provide state-level detail for the number of women and girls with pre-existing conditions and the number of pregnancies.

A large share of women have coverage through an employer or Medicaid and would, therefore, not face discriminatory practices such as medical underwriting or denials based on health conditions. But the data make clear that allowing insurers to return to pre-ACA practices could lead to millions of women and girls being denied coverage or charged more based on their health status if they ever sought coverage in the individual market.

 

 

The Texas lawsuit could end some of the ACA’s protections for employer coverage

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The Texas lawsuit could end some of the ACA’s protections for employer coverage.

Image result for health insurance guaranteed issue

The Trump administration’s refusal to defend portions of the Affordable Care Act is shocking enough. Equally shocking is how little it seems to care what happens if it gets what it’s asking for.

One question in particular: what about legal protections for the 160 million people who get insurance through their employers? Will their insurance still cover their preexisting conditions, even if they switch jobs? I honestly have no idea.

In its brief, the Justice Department argues that the community rating and guaranteed issue provisions of the ACA must be invalidated. But it never mentions that those provisions apply not only to individual health plans, but also to employer plans.

So should those rules give way across the board? Or only for individual insurance plans?

Maybe it should be the latter. The mandate isn’t critical to securing the health of the employer market, so the ACA rules that protect employees aren’t inextricably linked to the mandate and shouldn’t be invalidated. But it could also plausibly be the former: if the rules governing community rating and guaranteed issue are inseverable, maybe the court shouldn’t do micro-surgery to save some subpart of those rules.

But guess what? In its brief, the Justice Department doesn’t say which approach it endorses.

Actually, it’s worse than that.  When the Justice Department identifies the rules governing community rating and guaranteed issue, it doesn’t cite the ACA itself (Public Law 111-948). Instead, it cites parts of the U.S. Code that codify portions of the ACA (e.g., 42 U.S.C. 300gg). The implication is that the Justice Department wants the court to enjoin those code provisions.

But the code provisions were on the books long before the ACA was adopted. Prior to the ACA, they listed protections for employer-sponsored plans that had been adopted in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Among other things, HIPAA limited the circumstances under which an employer could refuse to cover an employee’s preexisting conditions. The protections weren’t perfect, but they were something. The ACA patched HIPAA’s gaps by amending those code provisions.

So if the U.S. Code provisions are enjoined altogether—which, again, is what the Justice Department appears to be asking for—some of the HIPAA-era protections would be wiped from the books too.* Is that really what the Justice Department wants? Because that’s the thrust of its brief.

The confusion may reflect a basic legal mistake, one that Tobias Dorsey highlighted in Some Reflections on Not Reading the Statutes: the U.S. Code is a codification of existing laws, but it’s not itself the law. That’s why code provisions shouldn’t themselves be the target of any injunction. Any injunction should run against the ACA itself. If that’s what the Justice Department really wants, then it has to clarify what it’s really asking for. Failing to do so could wreak havoc in the employer-sponsored market.

Even if the injunction only runs against portions the ACA, however, that still wouldn’t resolve whether the ACA’s protections would still apply to employer-sponsored plans. If they don’t, that’s a big deal: HIPAA’s protections are porous.

So far, however, the Trump administration hasn’t said a word—leaving 160 million people in the lurch.

 

Donald Trump is about to face a rude awakening over Obamacare

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/12/donald-trump-is-beginning-to-face-a-rude-awakening-over-obamacare/?utm_source=RealClearHealth+Morning+Scan&utm_campaign=c672ab1b84-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b4baf6b587-c672ab1b84-84752421

After reiterating his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he may keep two of the law’s most popular provisions. One is straightforward enough — children up to age 26 being allowed to stay on their parents’ plan. The other — preventing insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions — offers a perfect illustration of why Trump and most of the other Republicans critics of Obamacare don’t understand the health insurance market.

Let’s say that in the beautiful new world of “repeal and replace,” insurers are required to sell you insurance despite the fact that your kid has a brain tumor. Insurance companies know what to do with that. Their actuaries can calculate that kids with brain tumors typically require (I’m making this number up) about $200,000 a year in medical care. So they’ll offer to sell you a policy at an annual premium of $240,000.

At this point your response will probably be that such an outcome is not fair. When the law says insurance companies can’t discriminate on the basis for preexisting conditions, surely what it means is that they have to charge roughly the same price for health insurance, irrespective of your preexisting condition. In the language of insurance, that’s called “guaranteed issue at community rates.”

Unfortunately, in the states that have tried guaranteed issues at community rates, the insurance markets have collapsed. That’s because if you guarantee everyone the right to buy health insurance at community rates, then some consumers will game the system. The young and healthy ones won’t buy any health insurance at all — they’ll go without until they are diagnosed with diabetes or a brain tumor or get hit by a truck crossing the street. And when that happens, they will immediately call up Aetna or Anthem and exercise their right to buy health insurance at the low community rate, irrespective of their medical condition. It won’t be long before insurance companies begin losing a ton of money and are forced either to raise premiums through the roof or stop writing policies altogether.