Stabilizing individual health insurance markets with subsidized reinsurance.

Subsidized reinsurance represents a potentially important tool to help stabilize individual health insurance markets. This brief describes alternative forms of subsidized reinsurance and the mechanisms by which they spread risk and reduce premiums. It summarizes specific state initiatives and Congressional proposals that include subsidized reinsurance. It compares approaches to each other and to more direct subsidies of individual market enrollment. For a given amount of funding, a particular program's efficacy will depend on how it affects insurers' risk and the risk margins built into premiums, incentives for selecting or avoiding risks, incentives for coordinating and managing care, and the costs and complexity of administration. These effects warrant careful consideration by policymakers as they consider measures to achieve stability in the individual market in the long term.

Medical loss ratio regulation under the Affordable Care Act.

The minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) regulations in the Affordable Care Act guarantee that a specific percentage of health insurance premiums is spent on medical care and specified activities to improve health care quality. This paper analyzes the regulations' potential unintended consequences and incentive effects, including: higher medical costs and premiums for some insurers; less innovation to align consumer, provider, and health plan incentives, less consumer choice and increased market concentration; and the risk that insurers will pay rebates if claim costs are lower than projected when premiums are established, despite the regulations' permitted "credibility adjustments." The paper discusses modifications and alternatives to the MLR regulations to help achieve their stated goals with less potential for adverse effects.

The quality of emergency medical services.

Although Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is a crucial part of the health care system, there is relatively little research on the quality of those services. EMS agencies often measure their performance using criteria such as response time or total prehospital time. But larger scale studies that cross counties and providers are rare. This Issue Brief summarizes two studies that use comprehensive, longitudinal data from one state to assess the demographic, geographic, and professional factors that affect EMS performance.

Population density and racial differences in the performance of emergency medical services.

This paper analyzes the existence and scope of possible racial differences/disparities in the provision of emergency medical services (EMS) response capability (time from dispatch to arrival at the scene and level of training of the responding team) using data on approximately 120,000 cardiac incidents in the state of Mississippi during 1995-2004. The conceptual framework and empirical analysis focus on the likely effects of population density on the efficient production of EMS as a local public good subject to congestion, and on the need to control adequately for population density to avoid bias in testing for racial differences. Models that control for aggregate population density at the county-level indicate "reverse" disparities: faster estimated response times for African-Americans than for whites. When a refined county-level measure of population density is used that incorporates differences in African-American and white population density by Census tract, the reverse disparity in response times disappears. There also is little or no evidence of race-related differences in the certification level of EMS responders. However, there is evidence that, controlling for response time, African-Americans on average were significantly more likely to be deceased than whites upon EMS arrival at the scene. The overall results are germane to the debate over the scope of conditioning variables that should be included when testing for racial disparities in health care.