Coverage Losses by State for the Senate Health Care Repeal Bill
The Congressional Budget Office has just released its score on the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). Find out how each state will be impacted by the implementation of BCRA in this great article by Emily Gee from the Center for American Progress.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its score of the Senate’s health care repeal plan, showing that the bill would eliminate coverage for 15 million Americans next year and for 22 million by 2026. The CBO projects that the Senate bill would slash Medicaid funding by $772 billion over the next decade; increase individual market premiums by 20 percent next year; and make comprehensive coverage “extremely expensive” in some markets.
The score, released by Congress’ nonpartisan budget agency, comes amid an otherwise secretive process of drafting and dealmaking by Senate Republicans. Unlike the Senate’s consideration of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which involved dozens of public hearings and roundtables plus weeks of debate, Senate Republican leadership released the first public draft of its Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) just days before it hopes to hold a vote.
The Center for American Progress has estimated how many Americans would lose coverage by state and congressional district based on the CBO’s projections. By 2026, on average, about 50,500 fewer people will have coverage in each congressional district. Table 1 provides estimates by state, and a spreadsheet of estimates by state and district can be downloaded at the end of this column.
The coverage losses under the BCRA would be concentrated in the Medicaid program, but the level of private coverage would also drop compared to the current law. The CBO projects that, by 2026, there will be 15 million fewer people with Medicaid coverage and 7 million fewer with individual market coverage. Our Medicaid numbers reflect that states that have expanded their programs under the ACA would see federal funding drop starting in 2021 and that the bill would discourage expansion among states that would otherwise have done so in the future.
Like the House’s repeal bill, the Senate’s version contains a provision allowing states to waive the requirement that plans cover essential health benefits (EHB). The CBO predicts that half of the population would live in waiver states under the Senate bill. The CBO did not specify which states it believes are most likely to secure waivers; therefore, we did not impose any assumptions about which individual states would receive waivers in our estimates. Even though the demographic composition of coverage losses would differ among waiver and nonwaiver states, for this analysis we assume that all states’ individual markets would shrink.
CBO expects that state waivers could put coverage for maternity care, mental health care, and high-cost prescription drugs “at risk.” CBO projects that “all insurance in the nongroup market would become very expensive for at least a short period of time for a small fraction of the population residing in areas in which states’ implementation of waivers with major changes caused market disruption.” Note that health insurance experts have noted that in addition to directly lowering standards for individual market coverage, waivers would also indirectly subject people in employer coverage to annual and lifetime limits on benefits.
The CBO’s score lists multiple reasons why out-of-pocket costs for individual market enrollees would rise under the bill. One reason is that bill’s changes to premium subsidies means that most people would end up buying coverage resembling bronze-level plans, which today typically have annual deductibles of $6,000. In addition, EHB waivers would force enrollees who could not afford supplemental coverage for non-covered benefits out of pocket while also allowing issuers to set limits on coverage.
In summary, the CBO projects that the effects of the Senate bill would be largely similar to those of the house bill: tens of millions of people would no longer have coverage, and those who remained insured see the quality of their coverage erode substantially. In just a few days, the Senate will vote to turn these dire projections into reality.
Methodology
Our estimates of coverage reductions follow the same methodology we used previously for the House’s health care repeal bill. We combine the CBO’s projected national net effects of the House-passed bill on coverage with state and local data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the American Community Survey from the U.S. Census, and administrative data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia redrew their district boundaries prior to the 2016 elections. While the rest of our data uses census estimates corresponding to congressional districts for the 114th Congress, we instead used county-level data from the 2015 five-year American Community Survey to determine the geographic distribution of the population by insurance type in these three states. We matched county data to congressional districts for the 115th Congress using a geographic crosswalk file provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Our estimates of reductions in Medicaid by district required a number of assumptions. CBO projected that a total 15 million fewer people would have Medicaid coverage by 2026 under the Senate bill: 5 million fewer would be covered by additional Medicaid expansion in new states, and 10 million fewer would have Medicaid coverage in current expansion states and among pre-ACA eligibility groups in all states. The CBO projected that, under the ACA, additional Medicaid expansion would increase the proportion of the newly eligible population residing in expansion states from 50 percent to 80 percent by 2026. It projected that just 30 percent of the newly eligible population would be in expansion states. Extrapolating from the CBO’s numbers, we estimate the Senate bill results in a Medicaid coverage reduction of 3.3 million enrollees in current expansion states by 2026.
We then assume the remaining 6.7 million people who would lose Medicaid coverage are from the program’s pre-ACA eligibility categories: low-income adults, low-income children, the aged, and disabled individuals. We used enrollment tables published by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment Access Commission (MACPAC) to determine total state enrollment and each eligibility category’s share of the total, and we assumed that only some of the disabled were nonelderly. We then divided state totals among districts according to each’s Medicaid enrollment in the American Community Survey. Because each of the major nonexpansion categories is subject to per capita caps under the bill, we reduced enrollment in all by the same percentage.
Because we do not know which individual states would participate in Medicaid expansion in 2026 in either scenario, our estimates give nonexpansion states the average effect of forgone expansion and all expansion states the average effect of rolling back eligibility. We divided the 5 million enrollment reduction due to forgone expansion among nonexpansion states’ districts proportionally by the number of low-income uninsured. We made each expansion state’s share of that 3.3 million proportional to its Medicaid expansion enrollment in its most recent CMS report and then allocated state totals to districts proportional to the increase in nonelderly adult enrollment between 2013 and 2015. For Louisiana, which recently expanded Medicaid, we took our statewide total from state data and allocated to districts by the number of low-income uninsured adults.
Medicaid covers seniors who qualify as aged or disabled. Although the CBO did not specify the Medicaid coverage reduction that would occur among seniors under per capita caps, applying to elderly enrollees the same percentage reduction we calculated for nonexpansion Medicaid enrollees implies that 900,000 could lose Medicaid.
Lastly, our estimates of the reduction in exchange, the Basic Health Plan, and other nongroup coverage are proportional to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s estimates of exchange enrollment by congressional district. The House bill reduces enrollment in nongroup coverage, including the exchanges, by 7 million relative to the ACA. To apportion this coverage loss among congressional districts, we assumed that the coverage losses would be largest in areas with higher ACA exchange enrollment and in states where we estimated the average cost per enrollee would increase most under an earlier version of the AHCA.
The CBO projects that the net reduction in coverage for the two categories of employer-sponsored insurance and “other coverage” would be between zero and 500,000 people in 2026. We did not include these categories in our estimates.
See the original article Here.
Source:
Gee E. (2017 June 27). Coverage losses by state for the senate health care repeal bill [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2017/06/27/435112/coverage-losses-state-senate-health-care-repeal-bill/
Gaps in Coverage Among People With Pre-Existing Conditions
The passing of the American Care Act (ACA) in 2010 brought many changes to the healthcare marketplace. One of the most important changes that this legislation brought was coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. This legislation allowed people with pre-existing conditions to gain access to health care without facing higher premiums. But with the passing of the AHCA the market for pre-existing conditions is on the verge of changing. Check out this great article from Kaiser Family Foundation on how the AHCA will effect people with pre-conditions.
The American Health Care Act (AHCA), which has passed the House of Representatives, contains a controversial provision that would allow states to waive community rating in the individual insurance market. In this brief we estimate the number of people with pre-existing conditions who might be affected by such a policy.
How the State Waiver Provision Works
Under the provision, insurers in states with community rating waivers could vary premiums by health status for enrollees who have had a gap in insurance of 63 or more consecutive days in the last year. The higher (or lower) premiums due to health status would apply for an entire plan year (or the remainder of the year in case of people signing up during a special enrollment period), at which point enrollees would be eligible for a community-rated premium unrelated to their health.
States waiving community rating would be required to set up a mechanism to subsidize the cost of high-risk enrollees, such as a high-risk pool, or participate in a reinsurance arrangement that makes payments directly to insurers. States are not required to set up an alternative source of coverage for people who face higher premiums based on their health.
The bill makes $100 billion available to all states for a variety of purposes, including high-risk pools, reinsurance programs, and cost-sharing subsidies. An additional $15 billion is made available for a federal invisible risk-sharing program, which would be similar to a reinsurance arrangement. Another $15 billion is earmarked for spending on maternal and newborn care, mental health, and substance abuse services for the year 2020. The AHCA also allocates $8 billion over five years to states that implement community rating waivers; these resources can be used to help reduce premiums or pay out-of-pocket medical expenses for people rated based on their health status.
Premiums varied significantly based on health status in the individual market before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prohibited that practice beginning in 2014. Insurers in nearly all states were also permitted to decline coverage to people with pre-existing conditions seeking individual market insurance. We estimate that 27% of non-elderly adults have a condition that would have led to a decline in coverage in the pre-ACA market. While insurers would have to offer insurance to everyone under the AHCA, people with declinable pre-existing conditions would likely face very large premium surcharges under an AHCA waiver, since insurers were unwilling to cover them at any price before the ACA.
How Many People Might be Affected by Community Rating Waivers?
The effect of a community rating waiver would depend crucially on how many people with pre-existing conditions have gaps in insurance that would leave them vulnerable to higher premiums.
Using the most recent National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), we estimate that 27.4 million non-elderly adults nationally had a gap in coverage of at least several months in 2015. This includes 6.3 million people (or 23% of everyone with at least a several-month gap) who have a pre-existing condition that would have led to a denial of insurance in the pre-ACA individual market and would lead to a substantial premium surcharge under AHCA community rating waiver.1
Among the 21.1 million people who experienced a gap in coverage and did not have a declinable pre-existing condition, some also had pre-existing conditions (such as asthma, depression, or hypertension) that would not have resulted in an automatic denial by individual market health insurers pre-ACA but that nonetheless could also result in a premium surcharge.
In many cases, people uninsured for several months or more in a year have been without coverage for a long period of time. In other cases, people lose insurance and experience a gap as a result of loss of a job with health benefits or a decrease in income that makes coverage less affordable. Young people may have a gap in coverage as they turn 26 and are unable to stay on their parents’ insurance policies. Medicaid beneficiaries can also have a gap if their incomes rise and they are no longer eligible for the program.
Through expanded Medicaid eligibility and refundable tax credits that subsidized premium in insurance marketplaces, the ACA has substantially reduced coverage gaps. In 2013, before the major provisions of the ACA went into effect, 38.6 million people had a gap of several months, including 8.7 million with declinable pre-existing conditions.
Some people with a gap will ultimately regain coverage through an employer-based plan or Medicaid, and would not be subject to premium surcharges based on their health. However, anyone who has been uninsured for 63 days or more who tries to buy individual market insurance in a state with a community rating waiver would be subject to medical underwriting and potential premium surcharges based on their health.
Uncertainty Around the Estimate
There are a variety reasons why our estimates might understate or overstate number of people with pre-existing conditions who could be subject to premium surcharges under the AHCA.
People with health conditions would have a strong incentive under an AHCA waiver to maintain continuous coverage in order to avoid being charged premiums that could potentially price them out of the insurance market altogether. The question is how many would be able to do so, given the fact that the premium tax credits provided for in the AHCA would be 36% lower on average for marketplace enrollees than under the ACA and would grow more slowly over time. In 2013, before tax credits for individual insurance were available and the ACA’s Medicaid expansion took effect, the number of people with pre-existing conditions who experienced a gap in coverage was 41% higher. Among people with individual market insurance in 2015, we estimate that 3.8 million adults (representing 25% of all adult enrollees) had a pre-existing condition that would have led to a decline before the ACA. These individuals would not be subject to premium surcharges under AHCA community rating waivers, so long as they maintain continuous coverage. Because individual market subsidies would be significantly reduced under the AHCA, these individuals could face added challenges remaining continuously covered.
About 49% of people with pre-existing conditions who had a gap in coverage in 2015 had incomes at or below 138% of the poverty level, and some of them could be eligible for Medicaid (depending on whether their state has expanded eligibility under the ACA and what eligibility rules are in states that have not expanded). They would not face any coverage restrictions associated with their health status in Medicaid. However, under the AHCA enhanced federal funding for expanding Medicaid would be repealed, and federal matching funds would be capped. The Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million fewer people would be enrolled in Medicaid by 2026. So, while some people we identify as having a coverage gap would be eligible for Medicaid under the AHCA, many more people currently enrolled in Medicaid would lose that coverage under the AHCA and be uninsured. They would be eligible for premium tax credits, but the AHCA’s subsidies do not scale by income so individual market insurance would likely be unaffordable for people who are poor, including those with pre-existing conditions.
There is also significant uncertainty surrounding how many states would seek to waive community rating under the AHCA. Some states might do so to roll back what they consider to be excessive regulation of the insurance market initiated by the ACA and preserved under the AHCA. Other states might come under pressure to implement waivers from insurers who believe the market would be unstable, given that the AHCA repeals the ACA’s individual mandate. What states decide to do may ultimately have the greatest effect on how many people with pre-existing conditions face potentially unaffordable insurance premiums.
See the original article Here.
Source:
Levitt L., Damico A., Claxton G., Cox C., Pollitz K. (2017 May 17). Gaps in coverage among people with pre-existing conditions [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/gaps-in-coverage-among-people-with-pre-existing-conditions/?utm_campaign=KFF-2017-May-Pre-Ex-AHCA-Coverage-Gap&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-927vhm-poW6B4a5Qht6venQyS6-j9mRL1ecYqhgHd3bWp8UT-yBNineOJVRUwxXkUvJ3TalIEo_JBE9QE5o-n_pzrwyA&_hsmi=52007627&utm_content=52007627&utm_source=hs_email&hsCtaTracking=148c8fd6-8ba2-4f02-a508-45b17365a226|3ae33023-7ef1-44a9-a84c-b2a8d055e6bd
Analysis: 6.3 Million People with Pre-Existing Conditions Would Be at Risk for Higher Premiums under the House’s Health Bill
Take a look at this interesting article from Kaiser Family Foundation about how people with pre-existing conditions will face higher premiums on their health insurance due to the passing of the AHCA.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis estimates that 6.3 million people — 23 percent of 27.4 million non-elderly adults with a gap of several months in insurance coverage in 2015 – could potentially face higher premiums under the House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), due to pre-existing health conditions.
The bill, which passed the House earlier this month, allows states to waive community rating in the individual insurance market. Insurers in states with such waivers could vary premiums by health status for an entire plan year for enrollees with a gap in insurance of 63 or more consecutive days in the past year.
People with pre-existing conditions would likely face large premium surcharges under an AHCA waiver, according to the analysis, as insurers would be unable to decline coverage based on a person’s medical history, a practice that was permitted in nearly all states before it was prohibited by the Affordable Care Act in 2014. An earlier analysis from the Foundation estimated that 27 percent of non-elderly adults have a condition that would have led to a coverage refusal in the pre-ACA market.
The new analysis also identifies a second group of people who could be at risk of higher premiums: those with pre-existing conditions now buying their own insurance. It finds that an estimated 3.8 million adults, or about 25 percent of all adult enrollees in the 2015 individual insurance market, had a pre-existing condition that could subject them to higher premiums under an AHCA community rating waiver if they don’t maintain continuous coverage.
The AHCA allocates $8 billion over five years to states with community rating waivers, resources that can be used to help reduce premiums or pay out-of-pocket medical expenses for people rated based on their health status. However, the House bill does not require states to set up an alternate source of coverage for people who face higher premiums based on their health. It is uncertain how many states would waive community rating under the AHCA.
See the original article Here.
Source:
Author (Date). Analysis: 6.3 million people with pre-existing conditions would be at risk for higher premiums under the house's health bill [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://www.kff.org/health-reform/press-release/analysis-6-3-million-people-with-pre-existing-conditions-would-be-at-risk-for-higher-premiums-under-the-houses-health-bill/?utm_campaign=KFF-2016-The-Latest&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=52062246&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_VsXEz5DH19yz9a0M6hl4QfqXSaABYhLLADcvZymz30D-94xqDepLSsy4AGwu-LbtONEahQvbbjampBln3kkIlrAgSlw&_hsmi=52062246
Preexisting Conditions And Continuous Coverage: Key Elements Of GOP Bill
Do you suffer from a preexisting condition? Take a look at this article by Michelle Andrews from Kaiser Health News and find out how the passing of the AHCA will impact your health care.
Before he was diagnosed with head and neck cancer in 2015, Anthony Kinsey often went without health insurance. He is a contract lawyer working for staffing agencies on short-term projects in the Washington, D.C., area, and sometimes the 90-day waiting period for coverage through a staffing agency proved longer than the duration of his project, if coverage was offered at all.
When Kinsey, now 57, learned he had cancer, he was able to sign up for a plan with a $629 monthly premium because the agency he was working for offered group coverage that became effective almost immediately. The plan covered the $62,000 surgery to cut out the diseased bone and tissue on the left side of his face, as well as chemotherapy and radiation. His share of the treatment cost was $1,800.
If the American Health Care Act, which the House recently passed, becomes law, people like Kinsey who have health problems might not fare so well trying to buy insurance after a lapse.
The Republican bill would still require insurers to offer coverage to everyone, including people who have preexisting medical conditions, such as diabetes, asthma or even cancer. But it would allow states to opt out of the federal health law’s prohibition against charging sick people more than healthy ones. In those states, if people have a break in coverage of more than 63 days, insurers could charge them any price for coverage for approximately a year, effectively putting coverage out of reach for many sick people, analysts say. After a year, they would be charged a regular rate again.
Coming up with a figure for how many people have preexisting conditions that could put them at risk for facing unaffordable health insurance premiums has been the subject of debate, with estimates ranging from 133 million on the high end to 2 million on the low end.
What we know is that before the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, insurers in the individual market frequently charged people more if they were sick. According to a 2009 survey of individual market insurers by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, 34 percent of coverage was offered at higher-than-standard rates, while 6 percent of those offers included waivers that excluded coverage for specific conditions.
But some health policy analysts suggest that it’s not only people who have a gap in coverage who could be affected if a state seeks the health law waiver. There could be consequences for anyone with a preexisting condition, even those who have maintained continuous insurance coverage. That’s because the bill opens the door for insurers to set rates for people based on their health. For example, those without a health condition could be offered discounted premiums.
“If you have a preexisting condition, you’re going to be put into the block of business with the sicker risk pool,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.
Requiring people to maintain continuous coverage is the Republicans’ preferred alternative to Obamacare’s individual mandate that requires people to have insurance or pay a fine. But there are many reasons people may have a gap in coverage, especially if they’re sick, say consumer advocates.
“If they’re diagnosed with cancer and going through a grueling treatment, they might move closer to their caregiver or the cancer center,” said Kirsten Sloan, vice president for policy at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “They may quit their job for that reason, or they may lose their job.”
Once people have a gap in coverage they may really be in a bind if the available coverage is unaffordable. To address this, the Republican bill requires states to set up a high-risk pool or reinsurance program or participate in a federal risk-sharing program.
State high-risk pools, which were available in 35 states before the ACA passed, have been widely criticized, however, as inadequate for people with expensive health care needs. Premiums were often extremely high, and there were frequently lifetime or annual limits on coverage. Some plans excluded coverage for as long as a year for the very conditions people needed insurance.
Still, Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says high-risk pools offer a reasonable solution for the 2 million to 4 million people in the individual market he estimates have preexisting conditions but would otherwise be medically uninsurable or offered such high-cost coverage that they couldn’t afford it. The $130 billion over nine years that the bill sets aside to use for high-risk pools or other individual market activities, along with an additional $8 billion over five years for states that get waivers from ACA community-rating requirements, “could be adequate” to meet the need, he said.
Besides, he argued, the higher rates would last for only a year.
“Once you’ve paid up, you graduate back to the regular market,” Miller said. “It’s not like being sentenced to the Gulag.”
Kinsey said he plans to keep his coverage up to date from now on, but he doesn’t think it’s fair to charge sick people higher rates even if they have a break in coverage.
“It would be problematic,” he said. “I’m not in favor of that.”
See the original article Here.
Source:
Andrews M. (2017 May 16). Preexisting conditions and continuous coverage: key elements of GOP bill [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://khn.org/news/preexisting-conditions-and-continuous-coverage-key-elements-of-gop-bill/?utm_campaign=KFF-2016-The-Latest&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=52062246&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-90h4NOm7X9KLzIv7cYUNaGbi_qAFjmLW8NHmH89fiCT1u4SVQ8G95MFvTb3ljYlm3XiY20qWwsBfqH8PKOCwaULkf-ug&_hsmi=52062246
Poll: Majority Sees GOP Health Bill as Step Backward
Have you wondered how other Americans feel about the repealing of the ACA? Check out in this great article by Jonathan Easley from The Hill about a poll taken from Harvard detailing how people across the country really feel about the passing of the AHCA.
A majority of voters see the GOP healthcare bill as a step backward and want to see the Senate make significant changes to it.
According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris Poll survey, provided exclusively to The Hill, 55 percent view the House-passed bill as a step backward, compared to 45 percent who described it as a step forward.
Seventy-seven percent of Republicans view the bill as a step forward, while 77 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents view it as a step back.
Fifty-seven percent of voters said they want to see the Senate make significant changes to the bill if it is to be passed into law, including 64 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of independents.
Sixty percent of voters want the Senate bill to ensure people with preexisting conditions can get affordable healthcare.
An amendment to the House bill offers state waivers that would allow carriers to charge people more based on their health.
“The voters want to neither go back to ObamaCare nor to the House bill,” said Harvard-Harris co-director Mark Penn.
“The Senate is going to have to thread the needle here and craft a new compromise. The voters are mostly concerned with pre-existing conditions and are against any penalty for not having insurance. Solve the preconditions dilemma and they might have something that could get public support.”
The Harvard-Harris online survey of 2,006 registered voters was conducted May 17–20. The partisan breakdown is 36 percent Democrat, 32 percent Republican, 29 percent independent and 3 percent other. The poll uses a methodology that doesn't produce a traditional margin of error.
The Harvard–Harris Poll is a collaboration of the Harvard Center for American Political Studies and The Harris Poll. The Hill will be working with Harvard-Harris throughout 2017. Full poll results will be posted online later this week.
Satisfaction with the bill cut sharply along partisan lines.
See the original article Here.
Source:
Easley J. (2017 May 24). Poll: majority sees GOP health bill as step backward[Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/335003-poll-majority-sees-gop-health-bill-as-step-backward
Here’s What You Need to Know About Preexisting Conditions in the GOP Health Plan
Has the repeal of the ACA left you worried about all the changes potential coming to your healthcare? Take a look at this article by Glenn Kessler from the Washington Posts and find out what AHCA means for you and your healthcare.
With House Republicans prepared to take a vote Thursday on yet another version of a plan to overhaul the 2010 Affordable Care Act, attention has been especially focused on whether Obamacare’s popular prohibition against denying coverage based on preexisting medical conditions will remain in place. Republicans, from President Trump to lawmakers pushing for the bill, insist that it remains intact, just in different form. Democrats and opponents of the bill say the guarantee is gone or greatly weakened.
The reality is more nuanced and complicated, as is often the case in Washington policy debates. Despite Ryan’s tweet that people with preexisting conditions are protected, there is no guarantee that they will not face higher costs than under current law. The impact of recent tweaks to the proposed legislation is especially unclear because lawmakers are rushing ahead without an assessment by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. So here’s The Fact Checker’s guide to the debate.
What’s the issue?
Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could consider a person’s health status when determining premiums, sometimes making coverage unaffordable or even unavailable if a person was already sick with a problem that required expensive treatment. The ACA prohibited that, in part by requiring everyone to purchase insurance.
But that “individual mandate” was unpopular and Republicans would eliminate that requirement in their proposed American Health Care Act. As a replacement, the AHCA initially included a continuous coverage provision that boosted insurance rates by 30 percent for one year if he or she has a lapse in coverage. (We explored this interaction between the provisions earlier.)
As part of an effort to attract more votes, Republicans have added an amendment, crafted by Rep. Tom McArthur (R-N.J.), that instead allows states to seek individual waivers from the law. One possible waiver would replace the continuous coverage provision so that insurance companies for one year could consider a person’s health status when writing policies in the individual market. Another possible waiver would allow the state to replace a federal essential benefits package with a more narrowly tailored package of benefits, again limited to the individual and small-group markets.
The theory is that removing sicker people from the markets and allowing policies with skimpier options would result in lower overall premiums.
Who would be affected?
If the law passed, a person generally would not be affected unless they lived in a state that sought a waiver. Moreover, they would need to have a lapse in health coverage for longer than 63 days and they would need to have a preexisting condition. Finally, they would have to purchase insurance in the individual market – such as the health exchanges in Obamacare – that currently serves about 18 million Americans.
Someone who got their insurance from an employer – and that’s about half of Americans under 65 (155 million) – presumably would not be affected, though the CBO did project that under the initial version of the AHCA 7 million fewer people would be covered by employers than under current law by 2026.
Then, for a period of one year, a person who fell into this category would face insurance rates that could be based on their individual condition. But states that seek a waiver are required to operate a risk mitigation program or participate in what is called an invisible risk sharing program. Alaska currently has such a program that helps cover the bills for one of 33 conditions (such as HIV/AIDS or metastatic cancer). The individual with the condition still submits bills to the insurance company, which then turns around and bills the state. But then the insurance company does not consider the cost of this care as part of its calculation for premiums to other individuals in the state.
All told, the AHCA would allot $138 billion over 10 years for a variety of funds that would seek to keep premiums lower or to assist with cost-sharing. Just this week, $8 billion over five years was added to the pot to woo wavering lawmakers, with the idea that the additional funds could be used for so-called high-risk pools. Many states had such pools to help people with preexisting conditions before the ACA. But the proposal does not require a state with a waiver to set up such a pool.
What could go wrong then?
There are many uncertainties about this path. The health insurance market has a lot of churn, so many people may experience a gap in coverage of just a few months. One estimate, by the Commonwealth Fund, indicated that 30 million adults would have had such a gap in 2016, potentially exposing them to a surcharge or being placed in a high-risk pool. On top of that, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 27 percent of the people in the individual market have existing conditions that would have been uninsured before the ACA.
The AHCA eliminates cost sharing and offers a stingier tax credit to defray premium costs, likely resulting in higher overall health costs that may make insurance unaffordable for many people. (The CBO projected that 24 million more people would be without health insurance than under current law by 2026.)
Then, if people get sick, they may suddenly find themselves for a year being priced on their illness if they live in a state that sought a waiver. Depending on the approach taken by a state, some people might find it difficult to keep up their coverage for a full year before they qualify for prices at the community rate.
A big question is whether the funding to cover these folks is adequate. High-risk pools were big money losers and underfunded in the pre-Obamacare days, even though many had restrictions, high premiums and waiting lists. A $5 billion federal pool, established by the ACA as a bridge to the creation of the exchanges in 2013, covered about 100,000 people but was suspended when it ran out of money.
The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning group that opposes the AHCA, produced an analysis that indicated that even with the additional $8 billion, the maximum enrollment the AHCA’s funds would cover is about 700,000 people. If just 5 percent of the people currently in the individual market ended up in high-risk pools – and all states sought a waiver – that would overwhelm the proposed funding.
Avalere Health, a consulting firm, said in an analysis that $23 billion is specifically allocated in the bill for helping people with pre-existing conditions. That would cover about 110,000 people. If states allocated all of the other available funding, that would cover 600,00 people. “Approximately 2.2 million enrollees in the individual market today have some form of pre-existing chronic condition,” the analysis said.
When states had high-risk pools, people in those pools represented just 2 percent of the non-group health insurance participants. But given the limitations of those funds, that percentage may not be a good guide for what would happen under the AHCA.
Whenever health-care laws are changed, there are unknown and unintended consequences. The current system does not take into account a person’s health status when assessing premiums. But, as a Brookings Institution analysis suggested, under the AHCA’s provisions, healthy people might have an incentive to join plans based on health status. That would leave sicker people in the community rated plans, which in turn would face higher premiums. Over time, that could make the community rating meaningless. (Update: The CBO in its revised report on the AHCA said this was quite possible for states representing about one-sixth of the U.S. population. We explored that in detail in this article.)
Another possible outcome: If the pool of money is used to pay insurance companies for the difference in costs for patients with preexisting conditions, there may be little incentive for companies to keep their prices low; the difference would be made up by U.S. taxpayers.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to health care, readers should be wary about claims that important changes in health-care coverage are without consequences and that people are “protected” – or that the changes will result in massive dislocation and turmoil. There are always winners and losers in a bill of this size. In this case, if the bill ever became law, much would depend on unknown policy decisions by individual states – and then how those decisions are implemented.
See the original article Here.
Source:
Kessler G. (2017 May 4). Here's what you need to know about preexisting conditions in the GOP health plan [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/05/04/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-pre-existing-conditions-in-the-gop-health-plan/?utm_term=.bb8de3169f20
New $63 Fee Announced to Help Offset Healthcare Reform Cost
Source: openforum.com
Original article by Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar
As the regulations for Healthcare Reform are formulated and finalized, small-business owners need to be aware of a new fee that will be assessed beginning in 2014. The fee will be collected for 3 years and is set at $63 per insured person in the first year and is supposed to decline after that.
The fee is meant to help offset the cost for insurance companies as they comply with requirements to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. The fee is expected to generate $25 billion most of which will be placed in a federally administered fund and the rest will be given directly to the Treasury Department. Employers will have to pay the fee in advance on behalf of their employees. Individuals who purchase their own policies and do not participate in group policies, as many small-businesses owners do, will still be responsible for the fee.
Learn more at The Huffington Post.
