Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
First the good news, it appears that the Covered California marketplace is working. People are selecting lower cost options and forcing insurers to compete. Gabel et al. (2017) state that …the average purchased price for all plans was 11.6 percent less than the average offered price in 2014, 13.2 percent less in 2015, and 15.2 percent less in…
From Aaron Carroll at the Incidental Economist:
Health insurance premiums are projected to increase an astronomical 25% for plans in the health insurance exchanges. Some pundits claim that these increases represent that Obamacare is crumbling or in a death spiral. As premiums rise, healthy people flee the market. This leaves insurers with only more sick individuals which leads to premium increases. More…
Premiums are rising. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell stated: Building a new market is never easy,” she told the group at HHS headquarters. “We expect this to be a transition period for the marketplace. Issuers are adjusting their prices, bringing them in line with actual data on costs.” Burwell’s comments foreshadow the higher premiums expected when…
Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt things so. In an interview with Vox he states: The natural business model of a private commercial insurer is to price on health status and have the flexibility to raise prices year after year. What we’ve tried to do, instead, is do community rating [where insurers can’t price on how sick…
Health plans in the health insurance marketplaces have been competing to keep prices low, while still offering all the services mandated under the Affordable Care Act. One way to do this is to restrict provider networks to lower cost providers. For patients, restricting provider networks may be a good deal if (i) the quality of…
The answer is yes and no. According to a study Holahan, Karpman, and Zuckerman (2016), the health insurance exchange plans are good at insuring individuals against financial losses, but not everyone is happy with the care they are receiving. Low- and moderate-income adults with Marketplace coverage are no more likely to report problems paying medical…
There are a number of ways plans in health insurance marketplace can lower their premiums. One option is to increase cost sharing. Plans in the bronze and sliver tier have much lower premiums than those in the gold and platinum tier. Within any tier, plans can restrict patient access to lower cost providers; this also will reduce…
An interesting article from Politico shows that Mississippi was instituting a program—known as One Mississippi—that would allow small businesses employees to come together to purchase insurance at lower rates. It was seen as a conservative politically as it helped those who were working to access healthcare. This is exactly what one of the provisions of…
One of the ways health plans in the health insurance exchanges have been able to keep premiums down is through offering beneficiaries very narrow networks. By steering patients towards “efficient” doctors, premiums stay low. However, patients may worry that these “low cost” doctors are lower quality than those outside of the network. The tradeoff between…