Tag Archives: Uninsured

Is a Medicare option for all the only practical means to solve the healthcare insurance crisis?

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https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/payer-issues/is-a-medicare-option-for-all-the-only-practical-means-to-solve-the-healthcare-insurance-crisis.html

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From a healthcare consumer perspective, it increasingly strikes one that the healthcare insurance market is a story of haves and have-nots.

The haves include those that work for companies of a certain size, at which the companies can access insurance at very expensive but somewhat rationalized costs (think $16,000 to $20,000 per family per year, with employees contributing roughly $5,500), people on Medicare, and — crazily enough — people on Medicaid. (Again, the concept of a “have” here solely relates to the availability of healthcare coverage. It is by no means meant to understate the challenge of being in such poverty to be eligible for Medicaid.)

The have-nots include a vast number of people trying to buy insurance directly from insurance companies. Here, one increasingly hears that whether one is rich or poor, the costs are horrendous. Family costs for PPO plans seem to fall in the $20,000 to $25,000 range for many families, and even higher for those with preexisting conditions.

From a provider perspective, Medicare is a mixed bag depending on the type of provider. From a hospital’s perspective, it seems to be fine overall. From a physician’s perspective,  many seem to find it woefully inadequate.

One of the great challenges of the ACA is it set up an additional healthcare system of subsidies around insurance markets, mandates and so forth. It added complexity and costs, but also helped provide an additional basket of coverage for a good deal of uninsured Americans.

Regardless of political perspectives, rather than building another healthcare finance system, it seems that a simple approach would be to build on an existing system that, while imperfect, seems to work fairly well.

As an ardent capitalist at heart, the idea over the years of expanding a government program of any sort, including Medicare, has always led me to a negative conclusion. I.e., would it cause the kind of regression in our healthcare system that exists in systems in England or Canada, where care is famously inadequate or requires waiting months for certain types of care?

In contrast, at some point, does the cost of healthcare for those who don’t work for a large company and aren’t eligible for Medicare or Medicaid make the system so expensive that there is good reason to offer a Medicare option for such people? This demographic makes up a large part of the population, and it seems that the private insurance market is offering them only very expensive choices for health plans.

Much of my sense of the cost of private healthcare insurance comes anecdotally — from listening to diverse family and extended family around the Thanksgiving table, for instance. That stated, I do sense the cost of insurance for a family has moved from quite expensive to extremely and back-breakingly expensive. Sadly, I’m losing confidence that the core free market can fix it.

 

Senate GOP Tax Cut Bill Heads To Full Senate With Individual Mandate Repeal

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https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20171117.748105/full/

November 19 Update: Distributional Effects Of Individual Mandate Repeal

Late in the day of November 17, 2017, the Congressional Budget Office released a letter it had sent to Senator Ron Wyden, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, on the Distributional Effects of Changes in Spending Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as of November 15, 2017 as they are affected by repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s Individual Responsibility Provision. The letter updated the analysis the JCT had released on November 15 of the distributional effects of the Tax Act that had focused solely on the effects of the legislation on revenues and refundable tax credits. The update also addressed changes the repeal of the mandate would cause in other federal expenditures, including cuts in Medicaid, cost-sharing reductions (which CBO sees as mandatory spending and thus includes in its analysis), and Basic Health Program spending, as well as increases in Medicare disproportionate share hospital payments.

The analysis concludes that under the Tax Bill, federal spending allocated to people with incomes below $50,000 a year would be lower than it would otherwise have been over the next decade. For example, CBO projects federal spending for people with incomes under $10,000 will be $9.7 billion less in 2027 than it otherwise would have been, spending on people with incomes from $10,000 to $20,000 will be $9.8 billion less; spending on people with incomes from $20,000 to $30,000 will be $8.7 billion less, spending on people with incomes from $30,000 to $40,000 will $3 billion less; and spending on people with incomes from $40,000 to $50,000 will be $1.2 billion less. The CBO calculated these figures by calculating the number of people who are projected to drop Medicaid enrollment in each income category and their average Medicaid cost considering age, income, disability status, and whether they gained coverage under the ACA.

More controversially, the CBO determined that individuals with incomes above $50,000 would benefit from the repeal. People with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 would receive $1.7 billion more and people with incomes over $1 million would receive $440 million more. These increases are due to the increased expenditures on Medicare that will result from the bill, half of which the CBO distributed evenly across the population and half of which it allocated in proportion to each tax filing unit’s share of total income. As the increased Medicare disproportionate share payments are in fact paid directly to providers to cover their costs for serving the uninsured, who will predominantly be low-income, this seems to be an odd way to allocate these expenditures, although it is apparently standard CBO cost allocation practice, and ensuring that hospitals are not overwhelmed by bad debt does benefit people from all income categories.

The CBO specifies that it only considered the cost of the spending or spending reduction to the government, not the value placed on that spending by the recipients of the coverage it would purchase. A person who fails to enroll in Medicaid because the mandate is dropped is unlikely to value it at its full cost. Moreover, and importantly, the CBO did not take into account the cost of the mandate repeal to those who will feel it most acutely—individuals who are purchasing coverage in the individual market without subsidies who will face much higher premiums if the mandate is repealed.

The CBO also failed to consider the medical costs that will be incurred by individuals who drop health insurance coverage or the costs to society generally of a dramatic increase in the number of the uninsured.

Original Post

On November 16, 2017, the Senate Finance Committee approved by a party-line 14-to-12 vote a tax cut bill that will now be sent to the full Senate. The bill includes a repeal of the penalty attached to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s individual responsibility provision. This provision requires individuals who do not qualify for an exemption to obtain minimum essential coverage or pay the penalty.

A “Twofer” For Republicans: Additional Continuing Revenue And Elimination Of The ACA’s Least Popular Provision

The repeal of the individual mandate was included in the tax bill for two reasons. First, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT­) scored the repeal as reducing the deficit by $318 billion over ten years. This repeal would provide enough savings, including continuing savings in years beyond 2027, to allow Republicans to permanently reduce the corporate tax rate without increasing the deficit by more than $1.5 trillion or otherwise violating budget reconciliation requirements. Second, it would allow Republicans to get rid of the least popular provision of the ACA, making up in part for their failing to repeal the ACA despite a summer of efforts.

The savings that will supposedly result from the repeal of the individual mandate come entirely from individuals losing health coverage which the federal government would otherwise help finance.  A cost estimate released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on November 8, 2017 projected that repeal of the mandate would cause 13 million individuals to lose coverage by 2017, including five million individual market enrollees, five million Medicaid recipients, and two to 3 million individuals with employer coverage.

The CBO estimated that this loss of coverage would result in reductions over ten years of $185 billion in premium tax credits and $179 billion in Medicaid expenditures and a change in other revenues and outlays of about $62 billion, primarily attributable to increased taxes imposed on people who would lose employer coverage. (The increases would be offset by $43 billion in lost individual mandate penalty payments and a $44 billion increase in Medicare disproportionate share hospital payments to hospitals that bore the burden of caring for more uninsured patients.)

The total reduction in the federal deficit, in the opinion of the CBO, would be $338 billion over ten years. (The difference between the $318 billion in savings in the JCT tax bill score and the $338 billion in the earlier CBO/JCT individual mandate repeal cost estimate is presumably due to the fact that the Finance bill would only repeal the mandate penalty, not the mandate itself, and some individuals would presumably continue to comply with the mandate even without the penalty because it is legally required.) The JCT also projects that the repeal of the mandate will effectively result in a tax increase for individuals with incomes below $30,000 a year because of the loss of tax credits that will accompany the loss of coverage, further tipping the benefits of the tax cut bill toward the wealthy.

Behind The Coverage Loss Estimate

At first glance, the estimate that 13 million would lose coverage from the repeal of the mandate, including five million who would give up essentially free Medicaid, seems improbable.  Moreover, supporters of the tax bill contend that no one would be forced to give up coverage—coverage losses would all be voluntary. And, the argument continues, most of the people who are now paying the mandate penalty earn less than $50,000 a year, so repeal of the mandate will in fact be beneficial to lower-income individuals.

In fact, the CBO’s estimates of coverage losses (and budget savings) may be too high. The November 8 CBO estimates were lower than earlier estimates, and the CBO admits that it is continuing to evaluate is methodology for estimating the effect of the individual mandate. There is substantial confusion regarding the mandate requirement. A fifth of the uninsured, according to a recent poll, believe that the individual market is no longer in effect while another fifth do not know whether it is or not. Compliance with the mandate may already be slipping—the Treasury Inspector General reported in April that filings including penalty payments were as of March 31 down by a third from 2015. Part of the potential effect of repeal is already being felt.

Although the mandate repeal would not go into effect until 2019, media coverage will surely cause even further confusion and even more people to drop coverage, likely dampening enrollment for 2018 in the open enrollment period currently underway.

S&P Global released a report on November 16 estimating that only three to five million individuals would lose coverage from the mandate repeal. Coverage losses of this magnitude, however, would only result in savings of $50 to $80 billion over the ten-year budget window, meaning the tax bill would add another $240 to $270 billion to the deficit and put it in violation of the budget reconciliation rules.

Whatever the level of loss of coverage under a mandate repeal, it is reasonable to believe that it would be extensive. The CBO estimated that repeal of the mandate would drive up premiums in the individual market by 10 percent. Without the mandate, healthy individuals would drop out, pushing up premiums for those remaining in the market. Unlike the increases caused by the termination of cost-sharing reduction payments, this increase would likely be loaded onto premiums for plans of all metal levels and onto premiums for enrollees across the individual market, including off-exchange enrollees. Moreover, repeal of the mandate would likely cause another round of insurer withdrawals from the individual market as insurers concluded that the market was just too risky. Insurers left as the lone participant in particular markets without competition to drive down premiums would likely raise their premiums well above 10 percent.

Who Would Have The Most To Lose From A Mandate Repeal?

The biggest losers from a mandate repeal would be individuals who earn more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level and thus bear the full cost of coverage themselves.  These are the farmers, ranchers, and self-employed small business people who have traditionally bought coverage in the individual market. They are also include gig-economy workers and entrepreneurs who have been liberated by the ACA from dead-end jobs with health benefits to pursue their dreams. Their increased premiums might well offset any tax cut they receive under the bill.

If members of these groups are healthy, they might be able to find cheap coverage through short-term policies which the Trump Administration has promised to allow to last longer than the current three month limit and to be renewable. But those policies will not cover individuals with preexisting conditions.  And if healthy individuals are allowed to purchase full-year “short-term” coverage without having to pay an individual mandate penalty, even more healthy people will leave the individual market, driving premiums up even higher as the individual market becomes a high risk pool for individuals not eligible for premium tax credits. As premiums increased, so would premium tax credits, driving up the cost for the federal government.

The CBO estimate that five million will lose Medicaid coverage seems questionable, as Medicaid coverage is essentially free for most beneficiaries. But, particularly in Medicaid expansion states, there is a thin line between individual market and Medicaid eligibility, and many people who apply for individual market coverage find out that they are in fact eligible for Medicaid. Without the mandate, fewer are likely to apply at all. Moreover, Medicaid does not have open enrolment periods—people can literally apply for Medicaid in the emergency room, and many do. Without the mandate many will likely forgo the hassle of applying (or more likely reapplying) for Medicaid and only get covered when they need expensive hospital care. But they will thereby forgo preventive and primary care that could have obviated an emergency room visit or hospitalization.

Finally, in many families, parents are insured in the individual market but children are on Medicaid or CHIP. Without the mandate, the parents may forgo coverage, causing the children to lose coverage as well—and with it access to preventive and primary care.

The Involuntary Impact From ‘Voluntary’ Coverage Losses

Even if these coverage losses are “voluntary,” they will affect many who continue to want coverage. As already noted, as healthy people leave insurance markets, costs will go up for those who remain behind. Some of these will be people who really want, indeed need, coverage but will no longer find it affordable, and who will thus involuntarily lose coverage. Indeed, this effect may extend beyond the individual market. As healthy individuals drop employer coverage, costs may go up for those employees left behind.

Moreover, the voluntarily uninsured will inevitably have auto accidents or heart attacks or find out that they have cancer. Many will end up receiving uncompensated care, undermining the financial stability of health care providers saddled with ever higher bad debt, and driving up the cost of care for the rest of us.

Republican repeal bills offered earlier this year included other approaches to encouraging continuous enrollment—imposing health status underwriting or late enrollment penalties on those who failed to maintain continuous coverage, for example. The tax bill includes no such alternatives, nor could it.  It may be possible that states could step into the gap. Massachusetts, for example, had an individual mandate penalty even before the ACA; it was the model for the ACA. The District of Columbia Exchange Board has recommended that D.C. impose its own individual mandate tax if the federal mandate ceases to be enforced. Perhaps other states will step into the gap. But I am not counting on many doing so.

The individual mandate is there for a reason. It is intended to drive healthy as well as unhealthy individuals into the individual market and thus make coverage of people with preexisting conditions possible. It has been a significant contributor to the record reductions in the number of the uninsured brought about by the ACA. Without the individual mandate, the number of the uninsured would once again rise. Maybe not by 13 million, but nonetheless significantly.

 

The GOP’s Strategy for Killing Obamacare Now Looks Like This

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-22/the-gop-s-strategy-for-killing-obamacare-now-looks-like-this

The mandate to buy health insurance is the broccoli of Obamacare—the part you have to accept if you want the goodies, like affordable coverage of people with costly pre-existing conditions. Now Senate Republicans are saying you don’t have to eat your broccoli anymore. They eliminate the penalty for lack of coverage in their version of the $1.5 trillion tax cut bill, which they aim to vote on after Thanksgiving.

Could removing the penalty, which effectively kills the individual mandate, possibly make sense? Health-care economists describe the mandate as a necessary evil. Without it, they say, healthy people will roll the dice and choose to go uncovered, leaving insurance pools made up of sicker, older people who are costlier to cover. But the impact of the requirement is regressive. Well-off families generally get health insurance through their employers, so those who pay the tax for noncoverage tend to be poorer, some working two or three jobs to make ends meet.

For Senate Republicans, killing the individual mandate is a beautiful twofer. First, it’s a way to limit the red ink from their tax package. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates ending the mandate would save $318 billion over 10 years, because the people who dropped coverage wouldn’t get subsidies. Savings would continue after 2027. That’s crucial because under the Byrd rule, a measure can pass the Senate with a simple majority only if it doesn’t add to deficits beyond 10 years. Second, gutting the mandate would partially fulfill Republicans’ long-standing objective of getting rid of Obamacare entirely.

The downside for Republicans is that the repeal gambit has breathed new life into the pro-Obamacare coalition, which argues that Republicans are financing tax cuts for the rich by reducing the number of people with health insurance. “Adding ACA repeal to the corporate tax giveaway has fanned the flames of resistance into a roaring inferno,” says Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group. The Congressional Budget Office said on Nov. 8 that repealing the mandate would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 13 million and raise premiums by 10 percent “in most years” of the next decade.

Within hours of Senate Republicans’ announcing their intentions to kill the mandate, a coalition of trade groups for doctors, hospitals, and insurers urged them not to, warning that doing so would raise premiums. In Virginia, a CNN exit poll showed health care was voters’ top issue by more than 2 to 1. Democrat Ralph Northam won voters most concerned about health care 77 percent to 23 percent en route to his decisive election as their next governor.

This leaves Republicans in an awkward spot. While they crave the savings that come from repealing the mandate, they don’t love the reason why—namely, millions fewer people would be insured. That’s something they’ve always insisted wouldn’t happen. As recently as July, two White House officials wrote a Washington Post op-ed ridiculing the notion that millions of people “value their insurance so little that they will simply drop coverage next year following the repeal of the individual and employer mandates.”

Republicans are trying to have it both ways. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that dropping the mandate wouldn’t cut Medicaid. The CBO predicts that of the 13 million people who drop coverage, 5 million will be current Medicaid recipients. Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, balked. “Where do you think the $300 billion is coming from?” she asked Hatch. “Is there a fairy that’s dropping it on the Senate?”

It’s not just the Republicans who have a complicated relationship with the mandate. Democrats need it to make Obamacare hang together, yet they know it’s unpopular and regressive. Seventy-nine percent of the 6.7 million households that paid the mandate tax for 2015 had incomes under $50,000, and 37 percent made below $25,000, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Republicans tweak Obamacare’s defenders by arguing that if financially hard-pressed families want to drop their policies—and lose the government subsidies that go with them—that’s their right.

Democrats say the mandate gets people to do something that’s in their best interest and keeps emergency rooms from being swamped by uninsured sick people. (Republicans used to make this argument.) But the mandate is also a way to get healthy families to subsidize less-healthy ones, rather than just cover their own risks. That’s what makes it unpopular. “That’s sort of the trap,” says Christopher Pope, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Also, the mandate probably isn’t as effective as Democrats have argued. In its Nov. 8 report, the CBO said that for its next estimate, it’s changing its model for how people behave. While results won’t be ready until after Congress wants to finish the tax bill, it said, the effects “would probably be smaller than the numbers reported in this document.” In other words, it won’t reduce coverage as much—or save as much money. It could be that Obamacare needs to rely less on the stick (mandates) and more on the carrot (subsidies that hold down the cost of premiums).

A new CBO estimate that played down the impact of mandate repeal could work out quite nicely for the Republicans. They could point to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s current high estimate for savings to pay for the tax cut, and then next year’s lower estimate of coverage losses from the CBO to claim that eliminating the mandate wasn’t so harmful after all. “Politics is a funny business,” says Pope. “You use whatever weapon you can grab hold of.”

BOTTOM LINE – By dropping Obamacare’s individual mandate, Senate Republicans can raise billions to pay for their tax cuts—and undercut a key part of the health-care law.

 

Repealing the individual mandate would do substantial harm

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https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/11/21/repealing-the-individual-mandate-would-do-substantial-harm/?utm_campaign=Brookings%20Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=58686618

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he tax legislation reported by the Senate Finance Committee last week included repeal of the individual mandate, which was created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and requires individuals to obtain health insurance coverage or pay a penalty. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that this proposal would cause large reductions in insurance coverage, reaching 13 million people in the long run.

Supporters of repealing the individual mandate have argued that the resulting reductions in insurance coverage are not a cause for concern because they would be voluntary. Rigorous versions of this argument acknowledge that individuals who drop coverage would lose protection against high medical costs, find it harder to access care, and likely experience worse health outcomes, but assert that the very fact that these individuals would choose to drop insurance coverage shows that they will be better off on net. On that basis, advocates of repealing the mandate claim that its repeal would do no harm. However, this argument suffers from two serious flaws.

The first flaw in this argument is that it assumes individuals bear the full cost of their decisions about whether to obtain insurance coverage; in fact, one person’s decision to go without health insurance coverage shifts costs onto other people. Notably, CBO has estimated that the departure of healthy enrollees from the individual market spurred by repeal of the individual mandate will increase individual market premiums by 10 percent, causing some in that market to involuntarily lose coverage and causing those who remain to bear higher costs. In addition, many of those who become uninsured will end up needing health care but not be able to pay for it, imposing costs on other participants in the health care system. Because individuals who choose to become uninsured do not bear the full cost of that decision, they may choose to do so even in circumstances where the benefits of coverage—accounting for its effects on both the covered individual and the rest of society—exceed its costs.

The second flaw in this argument is that it assumes individual decisions about whether to purchase health insurance coverage reflect a fully informed, fully rational weighing of the cost and benefits. In fact, there is strong reason to believe that many individuals, particularly the healthier individuals most affected by the mandate, are likely to undervalue insurance coverage. This likely reflects a variety of well-documented psychological biases, including a tendency to place too much weight on upfront costs of obtaining coverage (including the “hassle costs” of enrolling) relative to the benefits insurance coverage would provide if the individual got sick and needed care at some point in the future. It is therefore likely that many people who would drop insurance coverage due to repeal of the individual mandate would end up worse off, even solely considering the costs and benefits to the individuals themselves.

The considerations described above mean that, in the absence of subsidies, an individual mandate, or some combination of the two, many people will decline to obtain insurance coverage despite that coverage being well worth society’s cost of providing it. Furthermore, unless the current subsidies and individual mandate penalty provide too strong an incentive to obtain coverage that results in too many people being insured—a view that appears inconsistent with the available evidence—then reductions in insurance coverage due to repealing the individual mandate would do substantial harm.

The remainder of this analysis takes a closer look at the two flaws in the argument that reductions in insurance coverage caused by repeal of the individual mandate would do no harm. The analysis then discusses why these considerations create a strong case for maintaining an individual mandate.

INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS TO DROP INSURANCE COVERAGE IMPOSE SUBSTANTIAL COSTS ON OTHER PEOPLE

As noted above, supporters of repealing the individual mandate have often argued that the resulting reductions in insurance coverage would do no harm because they are the outcome of voluntary choices. One major flaw in this argument is that one person’s decision to drop insurance coverage imposes costs on other people through a pair of mechanisms: increases in individual market premiums and increases in uncompensated care. I discuss each of these mechanisms in greater detail below.

Increases in individual market premium reduce coverage and increase others’ costs

Repealing the individual mandate would reduce the cost of being uninsured and, equivalently, increase the effective cost of purchasing insurance coverage. That increase in the effective cost of insurance coverage would, in turn, cause many people to drop coverage. Because individuals with the most significant health care needs are likely to place the highest value on maintaining insurance coverage, the people dropping insurance coverage would likely be relatively healthy, on average. In the individual market, those enrollees’ departure would raise average claims costs, requiring insurers to charge higher premiums to the people remaining in the individual market.[1]

CBO estimates that, because of this dynamic, repealing the individual mandate would increase individual market premiums by around 10 percent. Those higher premiums would push some enrollees who are not eligible for subsidies out of the individual market. Higher premiums would impose large costs on unsubsidized enrollees who remained in the ACA-compliant individual market—around 6 million people—while increasing federal costs for subsidized enrollees who remain insured.[2]

CBO’s estimates are at least qualitatively consistent with empirical evidence on the effects of the individual mandate. Perhaps the best evidence on this point comes from Massachusetts health reform. Research examining the unsubsidized portion of Massachusetts’ individual market estimated that Massachusetts’ individual mandate increased enrollment in the unsubsidized portion of its individual market by 38 percent, reducing average claims costs by 8 percent and premiums by 21 percent. Similarly, research focused on the subsidized portion of Massachusetts’ market found that the mandate appears to have been an important motivator of enrollment, particularly among healthier enrollees.

Direct evidence on the effects of the ACA’s mandate is relatively scant because it is challenging to disentangle the effect of the mandate from the effect of other policy changes implemented by the ACA. However, it is notable that the uninsured rate among people with incomes above 400 percent of the federal poverty level fell by almost one-third from 2013 to 2015. This trend is consistent with the view that the ACA’s individual mandate has increased insurance coverage since these individuals are not eligible for the ACA’s subsidies, and implementation of the ACA’s bar on varying premiums or denying coverage based on health status, taken on its own, would have been expected to actually reduce insurance coverage in this group. Because this estimate applies to only a relatively small slice of the population, it cannot easily be used to determine the total effect of the individual mandate on insurance coverage, but it does suggest that the mandate has had meaningful effects.

Repealing the individual mandate could also cause broader disruptions in the individual market for some period of time. Insurers would find it challenging to predict exactly what the individual market risk pool would look like after repeal of the mandate. Some insurers might elect to limit their individual market exposure until that uncertainty is resolved, particularly since the Trump Administration has signaled an intent to pursue other significant policy changes affecting the individual market. That uncertainty could cause some insurers to withdraw from the market, potentially leaving some enrollees without any coverage options. Alternatively, insurers could elect to raise premiums by even more than they expect to be necessary (e.g., by more than the CBO 10 percent estimate cited above) to ensure that they are protected in all scenarios, with significant costs to both individuals and the federal government. It is uncertain how widespread these types of broader disruptions would be in practice, but they are possible.

It is important to note that one person’s decision about whether to purchase individual market coverage affects the premiums faced by others because of a conscious policy choice: the decision to bar insurers from varying premiums or denying coverage based on health status. Without those regulations, individual coverage decisions would have little or no effect on the premiums charged to others. But policymakers and the public have, appropriately in my view, concluded that these regulations perform a valuable social function by ensuring that health care cost burdens are shared equitably between the healthy and the sick. Having made that decision, other aspects of public policy must take account of the fact that one person’s decision to go uninsured has consequences for the market as a whole.

Some newly uninsured individuals would need care, but be unable to pay for it

Dropping insurance coverage also allows individuals to shift a portion of the cost of the care they receive onto others in the form of uncompensated care. Even in the group of comparatively healthy individuals who elect to drop their coverage, some will get sick and need health care. Some of these individuals might be able to pay for that care out of pocket, but others—particularly those who get seriously ill—would likely be unable to pay for it. In some cases, that would cause these individuals to forgo needed care, but in other cases they would receive care without paying for it, either due to the legal requirement that hospitals provide care in emergency situations or through various other formal and informal mechanisms. (Although individuals would often still be able to access care without paying for it, they would frequently still be billed for that care, with potential downstream consequences for their ability to access credit.)

Uninsured individuals receive large quantities of uncompensated care in practice. Estimates based on the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey indicate that a non-elderly individual uninsured for the entire year received $1,700 in uncompensated care, on average, during 2013. Consistent with that fact, increases in the number of uninsured individuals increase the amount of uncompensated care. In the context of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized controlled trial of the effects of expanded Medicaid coverage, having Medicaid coverage was estimated to reduce the amount of uncompensated care an individual receives by almost $2,200 per year, on average. Quasi-experimental research has similarly found that increases in the number of uninsured individuals in a hospital’s local area increase the amount of uncompensated care a hospital delivers and that the expansion in insurance coverage achieved by the ACA substantially reduced hospitals’ uncompensated care burdens.

Precisely who bears the cost of uncompensated care, particularly in the long run, is not entirely clear. A portion of uncompensated care costs are borne by federal, state, and local government programs and, therefore, are ultimately borne by taxpayers. In 2013, around three-fifths of uncompensated care was financed by federal, state, and local government programs explicitly or implicitly aimed at this purpose. Increases in uncompensated care burdens are likely to lead to increases in spending on these programs. In some cases, those increases will happen automatically. For example, CBO finds that repealing the individual mandate will increase federal spending on the Medicare Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) program, which is intended to defray uncompensated care costs, by $44 billion over the next ten years because the formula for determining DSH payments depends on the uninsured rate. In other cases, changes may occur more indirectly, perhaps because higher uncompensated care burdens create political pressure to expand these programs (or make it harder to cut them).

The impact of uncompensated care therefore depends to a significant degree on how non-profit hospitals cope with reduced operating margins. Evidence on this point is relatively limited. However, in instances where increases in uncompensated care burdens cause providers to incur outright losses, they are likely to ultimately force facilities to close, which could reduce access to care or increase prices charged to those enrolled in private insurance by reducing competition. In instances where increases in uncompensated care burdens merely trim positive operating margins, lower margins presumably force hospitals to reduce capital investments or to reduce cross-subsidies to other activities such as medical education or research.Recent research focused on the hospital sector, which accounts around three-fifths of all uncompensated care, suggests that providers also bear a significant portion of uncompensated care costs in the form of lower operating margins. However, this does not imply that uncompensated care costs are ultimately borne by hospitals’ owners. Indeed, this research finds that reductions in operating margins in response to increases in uncompensated care occur almost exclusively among non-profit hospitals, plausibly because for-profit hospitals are adept at locating in geographic areas where the demand for uncompensated care is relatively low. (Greater distortions where providers choose to locate and what services they choose to offer may be an important cost of increased uncompensated care.)

INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS TO DROP INSURANCE COVERAGE MAY HARM THE INDIVIDUALS THEMSELVES

The argument that reductions in insurance coverage due to repeal of the individual mandate do no harm because they are voluntary has a second important flaw; specifically, this argument assumes that individual decisions about whether to obtain health insurance coverage reflect a fully informed, fully rational weighing of the costs and benefits. There is strong reason to doubt that assumption.

Economists commonly note that many people decline to take-up health even in settings where that coverage is free or nearly so. For example, analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) have estimated that, in 2016, there were 6.8 million people who were eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, but not enrolled in those programs, despite the fact that these programs had negligible premiums. Similarly, for this year’s Marketplace open enrollment period, analysts at KFF estimated that among uninsured individuals eligible to purchase Marketplace coverage, around two-fifths could obtain a bronze plan for a premium of zero, but few expect all of these individuals to enroll.

This type of behavior is very challenging to explain as the outcome of a fully informed, fully rational decision-making process. The fact that individuals who do not purchase insurance coverage can shift significant costs to others, as discussed above, can help explain why some individuals value insurance at less than the cost of providing it. But these factors cannot explain why enrollees would decline to obtain coverage that is literally free to them. In principle, “hassle costs” of enrolling in coverage could explain decisions to forgo coverage in these instances, but those hassle costs would need to be implausibly large to explain a decision to forgo an offer of free insurance coverage.

Precisely why individuals decline to take up insurance coverage even in settings where it seems clearly in their interest to do so is not fully understood. This review article catalogues a wide variety of psychological biases that may play a role, but three seem particularly important in this context:

  • Present bias: Economists have documented that individuals generally exhibit “present bias,” meaning that they place a large weight on current costs and benefits relative to similar costs and benefits in the future. In the context of insurance coverage, this type of bias is likely to cause individuals, particularly those who are currently healthy, to place too much weight on the upfront premium and hassle costs required to enroll in health insurance relative to the benefit of having insurance coverage if they get sick at some point in the future. This may cause individuals to decline to obtain insurance coverage even when it is in their economic interest, including in instances where the premium required to enroll is literally zero.

Overweighting of small up front hassle costs appears to lead suboptimal decisions in many economic settings, but the retirement saving literature provides a particularly striking example. Simply being required to return a form to enroll in an employer’s retirement plan has been documented to sharply reduce take-up of that plan, even in circumstances where employees forgo hundreds or thousands of dollars per year in employer matching contributions by declining to participate.

  • Overoptimistic perceptions of risk: One core function of health insurance is to provide protection against relatively rare, but very costly, illnesses. Indeed, a large fraction of the total value of a health insurance contract is delivered in those states of the world. In 2014, around 5 percent of the population accounted for around half of total health care spending.[3] But because these events are comparatively rare, many individuals, particularly healthier individuals, may have difficulty forming accurate perceptions of the risks they face. Research on Medicare Part D has found that individuals tend to place too much weight on premiums relative to expected out-of-pocket costs when choosing plans, providing some evidence that individuals do indeed underestimate risk (although research focused on insurance products other than health insurance has concluded that individuals may sometimes overestimate risk). Like present bias, misperceptions of risk can cause hassle or premium costs to receive too much weight relative to the actual benefits of coverage.
  • Inaccurate beliefs about affordability: Enrollees could also have inaccurate information about the availability of coverage. Survey evidence has suggested that, as of early 2016, almost 40 percent of uninsured adults were unaware of the existence of the ACA’s Health Insurance Marketplaces. Additionally, approximately two-thirds of those who were aware of the Marketplaces had not investigated their coverage options, with most saying that they had not done so because they did not believe that they could afford coverage. Individuals’ beliefs about whether coverage is affordable may be accurate in some instances, but it is likely that they are not accurate in many other cases. Inaccurate beliefs may cause many individuals to fail to investigate their coverage options, including some who are eligible for free or very-low-cost coverage.

REDUCTIONS IN INSURANCE COVERAGE FROM REPEALING THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE WOULD DO SUBSTANTIAL HARM

The factors identified above provide strong economic rationale for implementing some combination of subsidies and penalties to strengthen the financial incentive to obtain health insurance coverage. These policy tools can compensate for the fact that individual decisions to go without coverage do not account for the ways in which those decisions increase costs for others. Similarly, in many (though not all) instances, financial incentives can help counteract psychological biases that cause individuals to go without insurance coverage even when it is against their own economic interest.

This discussion does not, of course, speak directly to how large subsidies and penalties should be. At least in theory, it is possible to overcompensate for the factors catalogued in the preceding section by creating too large an incentive to obtain coverage and thereby causing too many people to become insured. This occurs if the cost of the additional health care individuals receive when they become insured plus the administrative costs of providing that coverage exceeds the health benefits of the additional health care and the improved protection against financial risk.

Estimating the optimal size of subsidies and penalties is beyond the scope of this analysis. However, it is notable that virtually no one in the current policy debate is arguing that the United States insures too many individuals. Furthermore, there is reason to doubt that this is an empirically relevant concern. For example, the research on Massachusetts health reform by Hackmann, Kolstad, and Kowalski that was discussed earlier used their estimates to calculate the “optimal” mandate penalty to apply to unsubsidized enrollees. They conclude that just offsetting adverse selection justifies a mandate penalty similar in size to the one included in the ACA; also accounting for either uncompensated care or imperfections in consumer decision making could justify a considerably larger penalty.

It therefore seems difficult to justify repealing the individual mandate on the grounds that current policies provide an excessive overall incentive to obtain insurance coverage. Of course, policymakers might believe that it would be preferable to swap the mandate for larger subsidies, perhaps because they believe that it is inappropriate to penalize individuals for not obtaining coverage. In principle, sufficiently large increases in subsidies could offset the reduction in insurance coverage that repealing the individual mandate would cause. But such an approach would require large increases in federal spending since it would keep insurance enrollment at its current level by providing larger subsidies to each enrolled individual. In any case, the Senate Finance Committee bill does not take this approach. Rather than increasing spending on insurance coverage programs to mitigate coverage losses, the bill uses the reduction in spending on coverage programs caused by repealing the mandate (which results from lower enrollment in those programs) to finance tax cuts.

 

 

 

 

 

The biggest health issue we aren’t debating

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https://www.axios.com/the-biggest-health-issue-we-arent-debating-2511098849.html

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Thanksgiving is always a time to think about those in need. How about, then, a group we don’t worry about enough: the many lower and moderate income Americans who can’t cover their cost sharing if they get sick? It raises the question: How much cost sharing is too much?

The bottom line: High deductible plans, which require people to pay large amounts out of pocket before their medical bills are covered, are a good deal for some middle and upper income people. But many lower and moderate income Americans simply don’t have $1,500 to $3,000 to pay for the colonoscopy that might save their life, or a stress test that might reveal the heart disease which is the cause of their chest discomfort.

The details: The chart, drawn from a new study, tells the tale: More than four in in 10 households with private coverage and incomes between 150% and 400% of the federal poverty line do not have enough liquid assets to cover a deductible of $1,500 for single people and $3,000 for families.

  • That’s not a high deductible plan, but about the average in an employer-provided insurance plan.
  • Sixty percent couldn’t cover deductibles double those amounts, which are not uncommon, especially in the individual insurance market.
  • Ninety percent of insured households with incomes of 400% of poverty or more could meet a typical employer insurance deductible, but just 37% of lower income household with incomes under 150% of the poverty level could.

For many families, even if they have insurance, any significant illness could wipe out all their savings, making impossible to fix a broken car to get to work, or pay for school, or make a rent or mortgage payment.

Congress has passed no law declaring that the country will go with high deductible coverage as its main approach to health insurance. There has been no meaningful debate about its pros and cons. But as deductibles and other forms of cost sharing have inched up year by year, the nature of insurance has changed.

The people to worry about most are the ones who are least equipped to deal with that change. There may be someone who fits that bill around your Thanksgiving table.

 

Medicaid Expansion Has Improved the Financial Outlook for Safety-Net Hospitals

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http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2017/nov/financial-impact-state-medicaid-expansion-safety-net-hospitals

Abstract

  • Issue: Safety-net hospitals play a vital role in delivering health care to Medicaid enrollees, the uninsured, and other vulnerable patients. By reducing the number of uninsured Americans, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was also expected to lower these hospitals’ significant uncompensated care costs and shore up their financial stability.
  • Goal: To examine how the ACA’s Medicaid expansion affected the financial status of safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid and in states that did not.
  • Methods: Using Medicare hospital cost reports for federal fiscal years 2012 and 2015, the authors compared changes in Medicaid inpatient days as a percentage of total inpatient days, Medicaid revenues as a percentage of total net patient revenues, uncompensated care costs as a percentage of total operating costs, and hospital operating margins.
  • Findings and Conclusions: Medicaid expansion had a significant, favorable financial impact on safety-net hospitals. From 2012 to 2015, safety-net hospitals in expansion states, compared to those in nonexpansion states, experienced larger increases in Medicaid inpatient days and Medicaid revenues as well as reduced uncompensated care costs. These changes improved operating margins for safety-net hospitals in expansion states. Margins for safety-net hospitals in nonexpansion states, meanwhile, declined.

Background

Through their missions or legal mandate, safety-net hospitals provide care to all patients, regardless of their ability to pay.1 They include public hospitals, which are often providers of last resort in their communities; academic medical centers, which combine their teaching function with a mission to serve vulnerable populations; and certain private hospitals.

Safety-net hospitals deliver a significant level of care to low-income patients, including Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured, typically providing services that other hospitals in the community do not offer — trauma, burn care, neonatal intensive care, and inpatient behavioral health, as well as education for future physicians and other health care professionals. They are also an important source of care to uninsured individuals who are ineligible for Medicaid or subsidized marketplace coverage because of their citizenship status.2

Several studies have suggested major reductions in uncompensated care and improved financial status at safety-net institutions in states that expanded Medicaid compared to those in states that did not expand.3,4 However, these results were based on interviews with a limited number of safety-net health system executives and staff. Our analysis expands on this research by examining changes in key financial metrics — that is, uncompensated care, Medicaid costs and revenues, and total hospital margins–across safety-net hospitals nationally using standardized data.

When compared to other short-term acute care hospitals, hospitals that met our safety-net hospital criteria had substantially higher Medicaid revenue and uncompensated care levels than non-safety-net hospitals. Safety-net hospitals, however, had lower operating margins (Exhibit 1).

Below we discuss findings on the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion on safety-net hospitals’ financial status. The ACA allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility to nonelderly adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The reduction in the number of uninsured under the ACA coverage expansions was expected to reduce the uncompensated care that hospitals provide, thus improving their financial status. As of 2015, 31 states and the District of Columbia had expanded Medicaid, while 19 states had not.5

We measure changes in the financial status of safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid prior to 2015 (326 hospitals) versus safety-net hospitals in states that did not expand or expanded in 2015 or after (268 hospitals). (See “How We Conducted This Study” for complete methods.)

Key Findings

Our analysis of Medicare cost report data for federal fiscal years 2012 and 2015 shows a sizable contrast in financial performance between safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA and those in states that did not. Performance metrics included the following:

    • Hospital operating margins.6 Operating margins improved for safety-net hospitals located in Medicaid expansion states compared with declines for those in states that did not expand. From 2012 to 2015, operating margins for safety-net hospitals in Medicaid expansion states increased from –3.2 percent to –2.1 percent in 2015 (Exhibit 2, Appendix A). In contrast during the same period, operating margins for safety-net hospitals in nonexpansion states declined from 2.3 percent to 2.0 percent. Largely accounting for this difference were increased Medicaid revenues and reduced uncompensated care costs. Even after expansion, safety-net hospitals’ operating margins in Medicaid expansion states were lower than those in nonexpansion states.
    • Medicaid inpatient days. From 2012 to 2015, safety-net hospitals in Medicaid expansion states experienced larger growth in Medicaid utilization than those in nonexpansion states (Exhibit 3). During the study period, Medicaid inpatient days in expansion states rose 13.5 percent. In comparison, Medicaid inpatient days in nonexpansion states fell slightly, by 0.9 percent.
    • Medicaid revenues and costs.7 The rise in use of safety-net hospitals in Medicaid expansion states resulted in these hospitals’ increased Medicaid revenue and costs compared to a slight decline in nonexpansion states (Exhibit 4). From 2012 to 2015, safety-net hospitals’ Medicaid revenues as a share of net patient revenues rose 12.7 percent in Medicaid expansion states. In contrast, during the same period, safety-net hospitals’ Medicaid revenues as a share of net patient revenues declined 1.8 percent in nonexpansion states. However, safety-net hospitals’ profit margins on Medicaid patients fell from 6.8 percent to 0.7 percent in expansion states, suggesting that the revenues received for newly eligible patients did not keep pace with the higher cost of treating these patients.
    • Uncompensated care costs.8 In 2012, safety-net hospitals’ uncompensated care costs as a percent of total hospital operating costs equaled 6.7 percent in expansion states compared to 5.7 percent in nonexpansion states (Exhibit 5). By 2015, however, the safety-net hospitals’ share of uncompensated care declined to 3.5 percent in expansion states, or a reduction of 47.4 percent. By comparison, in nonexpansion states that year, uncompensated care costs as a share of total hospital operating costs fell to 5.3 percent, a 7.8 percent reduction.

Discussion

These data suggest that the Medicaid expansion created by the ACA had a significant positive financial impact on safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid eligibility relative to those in states that did not expand. Safety-net hospitals in expansion states saw larger increases in Medicaid patient volume and revenue, reduced uncompensated care, and improved financial margins compared to safety-net hospitals in nonexpansion states. Although our study’s results are specific to safety-net hospitals, other studies have found similar trends across all hospitals in expansion and nonexpansion states.9

The improved financial stability of safety-net hospitals could allow these hospitals to continue expanding outpatient capacity, invest in strategies to improve care coordination, hire new staff, and develop better infrastructure to monitor costs.10 Such investments can also help prepare hospitals for new payment arrangements that may require them to assume more financial risk for patient care and outcomes. Improvements not only benefit the institutions and Medicaid patients but the communities these hospitals serve.

Current attempts to repeal the ACA aim to eliminate the Medicaid expansions over time and curtail Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 14 million people could lose their Medicaid coverage by 2026, which would have an adverse effect on safety-net hospitals in those states. Specifically, safety-net hospitals’ gains in reduced uncompensated care and improved overall financial margins could be lost in the future.

 

CBO Projects 13 Million More Nonelderly Uninsured by 2025 if the Individual Mandate is Repealed

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CBO Projects 13 Million More Nonelderly Uninsured by 2025 if the Individual Mandate is Repealed

 

 

Podcast: ‘What The Health?’ Tax Bill Or Health Bill?

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https://khn.org/news/podcast-what-the-health-tax-bill-or-health-bill/?utm_campaign=KFF-2017-The-Latest&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=58570997&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-90FnDooDrGIdtTTHP8VfZovw1vS_Y_js4RdDwCCIwslKGDgrqu1yZ6bbcLJ5AbWfyJaM2B3HhQ9fR9txLD5dY-TnO3HA&_hsmi=58570997

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Republican efforts to alter the health law, left for dead in September, came roaring back to life this week as the Senate Finance Committee added a repeal of the “individual mandate” fines for not maintaining health insurance to their tax bill.

In this episode of “What the Health?” Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Sarah Kliff of Vox.com, Joanne Kenen of Politico and Alice Ollstein of Talking Points Memo discuss the other health implications of the tax bill, as well as the current state of the Affordable Care Act.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

  • The tax bill debate proves that Republicans’ zeal to repeal the Affordable Care Act is never dead. The new congressional efforts to kill the penalties for the health law’s individual mandate could seriously wound the ACA since the mandate helps drive healthy people to buy insurance.
  • One of the most overlooked consequences of the tax debate is that it could trigger a substantial cut in federal spending on Medicare.
  • A $25,000 MRI? That’s what one family paid to go out of their plan’s network to get the hospital they wanted for the procedure for their 3-year-old. Such choices are again drawing complaints about narrow networks of doctors and hospitals available in some health plans.
  • Although they don’t likely say it in front of cameras, many Democrats are relieved at President Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, former HHS official Alex Azar.
  • Federal officials have given 10 states and four territories extra money to keep their Children’s Health Insurance Programs running but it’s not clear what couch they found the money hidden in.
  • And in remembrance of Uwe Reinhardt, a reminder that he always stressed that a health care debate was about more than money — it was about real people.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists recommend their favorite health stories of the week they think you should read, too.

The Senate Tax Bill Threatens Access to Health Care

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https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2017/11/16/442906/senate-tax-bill-threatens-access-health-care/

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This week, Senate Republicans announced that they plan to pay for their tax cuts for large corporations and millionaires not only by imposing tax increases on the middle-class but also by undermining people’s access to health care. Specifically, they have proposed eliminating the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual mandate, which helps keep premium costs affordable by ensuring that both healthy and sick people have health insurance.

Repealing the mandate would drive up premiums by 10 percent in 2019 and lead to 13 million fewer people having health insurance by 2025. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report also revealed that the similar House version of the tax bill would result in $25 billion in cuts to Medicare in fiscal year 2018 and hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to the program overall. Taken as a whole, the tax bill would not only increase taxes for millions of middle-class families but would also have disastrous effects on people’s health care.

A typical middle-class family buying individual market insurance would see premiums increase nearly $2,000

The Senate tax bill would substantially increase premiums in the individual market for health insurance, and middle-class families would bear the brunt of the price hike. The bill would eliminate the individual mandate—the requirement that people maintain health coverage or pay a penalty. Without the mandate, people would only purchase coverage when they needed it, resulting in adverse selection that would drive up premiums. The CBO estimates that premiums would increase about 10 percent as a result of this adverse selection.

The Center for American Progress estimates that this premium increase translates to an extra $1,990 for benchmark plan coverage for an unsubsidized middle-class family of four. Families with incomes above 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL)—more than $98,400 for a family of four in the lower 48 states—are not eligible for premium tax creditsto reduce the cost of marketplace coverage. The 10 percent increase would be an even greater financial burden for families in states with higher premium levels, increasing costs by $2,900 in Alaska, $2,350 in Maine, and $2,060 in Arizona.

13 million more people would be uninsured by 2025

The CBO estimates that repeal of the mandate would result in 4 million fewer people having coverage in 2019 and 13 million fewer with coverage by 2025. As a result, about 16 percent of the nonelderly population would not have health insurance by 2025, compared with about 10 percent currently.

The individual mandate is necessary because of the consumer protections put in place by the ACA. The ACA banned discrimination by insurance companies against people with pre-existing conditions, required that people be charged the same amount regardless of health status, and eliminated annual and lifetime limits on coverage. But these protections would also make it easy for people to game the system by only buying health insurance once they needed it. To address this concern, the ACA coupled these reforms with an individual shared responsibility provision, also known as the individual mandate, which requires that everyone maintain health insurance coverage so that the overall insurance risk pool is healthy and premium rates are kept in check.

Repeal of the mandate would have two effects on the individual market. First, people who expect to be healthy would avoid purchasing coverage until they need it. As a result, the remaining enrollees in the individual market would be sicker on average, and insurance companies would need to raise rates to cover the increased average cost. Second, the resulting higher premiums would discourage additional people from purchasing coverage through the individual market. Those who become uninsured would no longer have financial protection against catastrophic medical costs, and hospitals and other providers would be forced to provide more uncompensated care.

Medicare would be cut by $25 billion in 2018

In addition to its frontal assault on health care for the middle class, the Senate bill would also secretly cut Medicare. Because the tax cuts for the wealthy in the proposed bill are not fully paid for, they would increase the deficit by more than $1.4 trillion over 10 years. But the little-known Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 requires that any deficit-increasing legislation be offset with cuts to other mandatory programs, including Medicare. The CBO has estimated that the offsetting spending reductions for the similar House version of the tax bill would cut Medicare by about $25 billion in fiscal year 2018. Given that similar cuts would be required in subsequent years, the total cost imposed on the Medicare program would be hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. This would have a particularly harmful effect on rural hospitals with thin margins, which could be at risk of closure as a result.

Asking millions of middle-class families to pay more in taxes so that corporations and the wealthy few can pay less in bad enough. But to use those cuts to also undermine health care for middle-class families is unconscionable. Once again, the congressional majority seems to be doing everything in its power to make life harder for everyday Americans, just so it can provide giveaways to the wealthy few.

Methodology

Our estimated reduction in coverage in 2025 due to repeal of the mandate is based on national projections by the CBO. The CBO estimates that 13 million fewer people will have coverage in 2025, including 5 million fewer people with Medicaid, 5 million fewer people with individual market coverage, and 3 million fewer people with employer-sponsored insurance. We used data from the 2016 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample (ACS PUMS), available from the IPUMS-USA to tabulate the number of nonelderly people in each state by primary coverage type using a coverage hierarchy. We then assumed that each state’s reduction in coverage was proportional to its share of the national total for each of those three coverage types. For more on the IPUMS-USA data set, see Steven Ruggles and others, “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0” (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2010).

We made two adjustments to our ACS PUMS tabulations to account for potential effects of Medicaid expansion in Maine, given voters’ recent approval of expansion. We increased the number of Medicaid enrollees in Maine by 51,000 based on projections by the Urban Institute. We also decreased the number of people with coverage through Maine’s individual market by 20 percent to account for the fact that some enrollees will lose access to marketplace premium subsidies when they become Medicaid eligible under expansion. Enrollment data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) show that 27 percent of 2017 marketplace plan selections were by people with family incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

Our estimates of 2019 premium increases are based on the CBO projection that mandate repeal will increase individual market premiums 10 percent. We used the HealthCare.govplan information to calculate the 2018 average marketplace benchmark—second-lowest cost silver—plan in each state, weighting by the geographic distribution of current marketplace enrollment. We then inflated that premium to 2019 levels according to National Health Expenditure projections for per-enrollee cost growth. To calculate the 2019 average benchmark premium specific to a typical family of four, we borrowed the example family composition that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uses in its reports: 40-year-old and 38-year-old parents and two children. We estimated that the family would pay an additional 10 percent of that 2019 benchmark due to mandate repeal. Premium data were not available for all states.

Finally, our estimates of state-level cuts to Medicare in fiscal year 2018 divided the $25 billion total Medicare funding reduction projected by the CBO proportional to each state’s share of national Medicare spending as of 2014, the most recent year for which CMS National Health Expenditure data is available, using data published by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Health Care for Millions at Risk as Tax Writers Look for Revenue

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/health-care-for-millions-at-risk-as-tax-writers-look-for-revenue

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The Republican tax plans are suddenly looking a lot more like health-care bills, with provisions that may affect coverage and increase medical expenses for millions of families.

The House version of the tax bill, which President Donald Trump endorsed on Tuesday, would end a deduction that allows families of disabled children and elderly people to write off large medical expenses. The Senate plan would repeal the Obamacare requirement that most Americans carry insurance, a move that insurers promise would raise premiums in the nationwide individual insurance market.

The provisions would help offset the cost of large tax cuts for corporations and individuals. But the move has sparked a new wave of opposition from the health-care industry and others who are concerned about its impact — the same political headwinds that tanked Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act earlier this year.

Either proposal, if signed into law, “could be devastating for some families with disabilities,” said Kim Musheno, vice president of public policy at the Autism Society, a Bethesda, Maryland, organization that advocates for people with autism. “Families depend on that deduction. And if they deal with the individual mandate, that’s going to cut 13 million people from their health care,” she said, citing a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

Republicans and some conservative groups, though, argue that removing the penalty for uninsured individuals would represent a tax cut for many low-income people who pay it now. Americans for Tax Reform, the group led by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, said that Internal Revenue Service data from tax year 2015 show that 79 percent of households that paid the penalty earned less than $50,000 a year.

Most Americans already think the tax legislation is designed to benefit the rich and oppose the bill by a two-to-one margin, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday. The survey was conducted between Nov. 7 and Nov. 13 — before the repeal of the Obamacare mandate was introduced — and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points. Some of the details in both tax plans have changed since the survey, and the Senate tax-writing committee is still working on its draft.

Republican Concerns

Few Republicans have spoken out about the House bill’s repeal of the medical-expense break. The bill faces a vote on the House floor Thursday. But some criticism has begun to surface as advocacy groups including the AARP and the American Cancer Society have highlighted the harm the House bill could have on families battling diseases and on the elderly. People with tens of thousands of dollars in annual medical expenses often rely on the tax deduction to make ends meet.

Representative Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, said Wednesday he’ll vote against the House bill in part because it eliminates the deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses.

“There are a lot of seniors in my district and this is life and death for them,” he said.

The deduction is allowed under current law if medical expenses exceed 10 percent of a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income. Almost 9 million taxpayers deducted about $87 billion in medical expenses for the 2015 tax year, according to the IRS.

Representative Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee, said some of his constituents who live in expensive elder-care facilities could be harmed if the deduction is scrapped.

“I think it’s one we have to continue to massage a bit,” he said. “There’s a lot of things out there and there’s maybe going to be an opportunity to adjust some of them.”

He declined to elaborate.

Obamacare Repeal

On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Republican leaders’ sudden decision to add a partial Obamacare repeal to their bill has energized Democratic opposition.

“You don’t fix the health insurance system by throwing it into a tax bill and causing premiums to go up 10 percent,” Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, told reporters Wednesday.

Were the ACA’s insurance mandate repealed absent a new policy to compel the purchase of coverage, the CBO projects that premiums would rise 10 percent for people who buy insurance on their own and more than 13 million Americans would lose or drop their coverage.

But a reduction in the number of people with insurance also translates to less taxpayer money spent to provide subsidies for premiums under the ACA. Ending the requirement as of 2019 would save the government an estimated $318 billion, helping to offset the cost of lowering the corporate tax rate.

In addition, the Senate’s tax plan could trigger sharp cuts to Medicare and other programs in order to meet budget deficit rules, according to CBO.

Easy Ads

The move to target Obamacare comes after Republicans lost elections in Virginia and other states earlier this month. Health care was a significant factor in those races and Republicans will face punishing campaign ads if they try to chip away at Obamacare or end the medical-expense deduction while cutting taxes, said political analyst David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama.

“The thing that makes it more of a potent issue is that it’s all being done to facilitate what essentially is a massive corporate tax cut and an individual tax cut that’s skewed to wealthy Americans,” he said in an interview. “You don’t have to work very hard to make those ads.”

The White House argues that the ACA’s insurance mandate isn’t popular and disproportionately affects low- and middle-income Americans who are forced to buy insurance that may be more expensive than they can afford.

“The President’s priorities for tax reform have been clear from the beginning: make our businesses globally competitive, and deliver tax cuts to the middle class,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement. “He is glad to see the Senate is considering including the repeal of the onerous mandates of Obamacare in its tax reform legislation and hopes that those savings will be used to further reduce the burden it has placed on middle-class families.”

‘Cut Top Rate’

Trump, though, has said proceeds from repealing the insurance mandate should be used to cut taxes even further for wealthy people.

“How about ending the unfair & highly unpopular Indiv Mandate in OCare & reducing taxes even further?” Trump said Monday in a tweet. “Cut top rate to 35% w/all of the rest going to middle income cuts?”

Like Republicans’ failed attempts to repeal the ACA, the tax plan is amassing a growing list of opponents from the world of medicine.

Insurers, hospital groups and disability advocates have spoken out forcefully against the health-care proposals in the bill. Hospitals and insurance groups wrote a letter to Congressional leaders on Tuesday warning of dire health-care outcomes if the tax measure becomes law.

“Repealing the individual mandate without a workable alternative will reduce enrollment, further destabilizing an already fragile individual and small group health insurance market on which more than 10 million Americans rely,” said the letter, signed by six health-care groups, including the American Hospital Association and America’s Health Insurance Plans.