Individual market health plan affordability after cost-sharing reduction subsidy cuts.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate how changes in insurer participation and composition as well as state policies affect health plan affordability for individual market enrollees. DATA SOURCES: 2014-2019 Qualified Health Plan Landscape Files augmented with supplementary insurer-level information. STUDY DESIGN: We measured plan affordability for subsidized enrollees using premium spreads, the difference between the benchmark plan and the lowest cost plan, and premium levels for unsubsidized enrollees. We estimated how premium spreads and levels varied with insurer participation, insurer composition, and state policies using log-linear models for 15 222 county-years. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Increased insurer participation reduces premium levels, which is beneficial for unsubsidized enrollees. However, it also reduces premium spreads, leading to lower plan affordability for subsidized enrollees. States responding to cost-sharing reduction subsidy payment cuts by increasing only silver plans' premiums increase premium spreads, particularly when premium increases are restricted to on-Marketplace silver plans. The latter approach also protects unsubsidized, off-Marketplace enrollees from experiencing premium shocks. CONCLUSIONS: Insurer participation and insurer composition affect subsidized and unsubsidized enrollees' health plan affordability in different ways. Decisions by state regulators regarding health plan pricing can significantly affect health plan affordability for each enrollee segment.

Court Rules Individual Mandate, Entire ACA Unconstitutional.

The holiday season brought a potentially fatal blow to the Affordable Care Act, but enrollment remained steady, and the law remains in place.

What Is Federalism in Healthcare For?

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers a window into modern American federalism--and modern American nationalism--in action. The ACA's federalism is defined not by separation between state and federal, but rather by a national structure that invites state-led implementation. As it turns out, that structure was only a starting point for a remarkably dynamic and adaptive implementation process that has generated new state-federal arrangements. States move back and forth between different structural models vis-a-vis the federal government; internal state politics produce different state choices; states copy, compete, and cooperate with each other; and negotiation with federal counterparts is a near constant. These characteristics have endured through the change in presidential administration. This Article presents the results of a study that tracked the details of the ACA's federalism-related implementation from 2012 to 2017. Among the questions that motivated the project: Does the ACA actually effectuate "federalism," and what are federalism's key attributes when entwined with national statutory implementation? A federal law on the scale of the ACA presented a rare opportunity to investigate implementation from a statute's very beginning and to provide the concrete detail often wanting in federalism scholarship. The findings deconstruct assumptions about federalism made by theorists of all stripes, from formalist to modern. Federalism's commonly invoked attributes--including autonomy, cooperation, experimentation, and variation--have not been dependent on any particular architecture of either state-federal separation or entanglement, even though theorists typically call on "federalism" to produce them. Instead, these attributes have been generated in ACA implementation across virtually every kind of governance model--that is, regardless whether states expand Medicaid; get waivers; or operate their own insurance exchanges or let the federal government do it for them. This makes it extraordinarily challenging to measure which structural arrangements are most "federalist," especially because the various federalism attributes are not always present together. The study also uncovers major theoretical difficulties when it comes to healthcare: Without a clear conception of the U.S. healthcare system's goals, how can we know which structural arrangements serve it best, much less whether they are working? If healthcare federalism is a mechanism to produce particular policy outcomes, we should determine whether locating a particular facet of healthcare design in the states versus the federal government positively affects, for example, healthcare cost, access, or quality. If, instead, healthcare federalism serves structural aims regardless of policy ends--for instance, reserving power to states in the interest of sovereignty or checks and balances--we should examine whether it does in fact accomplish those goals, and we should justify why those goals outweigh the moral concerns that animate health policy. The ACA did not cause this conceptual confusion, but it retained and built on a fragmented healthcare landscape that already was riddled with structural and moral compromises. This does not mean that federalism is an empty concept or that it does not exist in the ACA. Federalism scholars tend to argue for particular structural arrangements based on prior goals and values. The ACA's architecture challenges whether any of these goals and values are unique to federalism or any particular expression of it. At the same time, the ACA's implementation is clearly a story about state leverage, intrastate democracy, and state policy autonomy within, not apart from, a national statutory scheme. Its implementation illustrates how federalism is a proxy for many ideas and challenges us to ask what we are really fighting over, or seeking, when we invoke the concept in healthcare and beyond.

Small Changes or Big Ones? The Case of Limits on Prescription Drug Copayments in California.

Despite standardization, advocates for various industries and certain patient needs continue to propose changes in coverage rules. Much of the advocacy is occurring at the state level with a focus on pharmaceutical coverage, such as equalizing cost sharing between oral and infused oncology drugs or setting limits on cost sharing for prescriptions.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2019. Final rule.

This final rule sets forth payment parameters and provisions related to the risk adjustment and risk adjustment data validation programs; cost-sharing parameters; and user fees for Federally-facilitated Exchanges and State Exchanges on the Federal platform. It finalizes changes that provide additional flexibility to States to apply the definition of essential health benefits (EHB) to their markets, enhance the role of States regarding the certification of qualified health plans (QHPs); and provide States with additional flexibility in the operation and establishment of Exchanges, including the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Exchanges. It includes changes to standards related to Exchanges; the required functions of the SHOPs; actuarial value for stand-alone dental plans; the rate review program; the medical loss ratio program; eligibility and enrollment; exemptions; and other related topics.

Refinement of the Affordable Care Act.

Regardless of what legislation the federal government adopts to address health insurance coverage for nonelderly Americans, private insurance will likely play a major role. This article begins by listing some of the major reasons critics dislike the Affordable Care Act (ACA), then discusses the validity of these concerns from an economics perspective. Criticisms of the ACA include the increased role of government in health care, the ACA's implicit income redistribution, and concern about high and rising insurance premiums. Suggestions for refining the ACA and its market-based insurance system are then offered, with the goals of lowering insurance premiums, improving coverage rates, and/or addressing the concerns of ACA critics. Americans favor the increase in insurance coverage that has occurred under the ACA. In order to sustain this level of coverage, steps to lower Marketplace premiums through a variety of strategies affecting potential enrollees, insurers, and healthcare providers are offered.

ACA Open Enrollment Starts Amidst Tumult.

The Affordable Care Act continues to be buffeted by administration actions; a bipartisan market stabilization effort emerges in Congress.

If Congress Won't Salvage Reinsurance, State Waivers May Offer a Workaround.

Shards of a bipartisan effort to stabilize the individual health insurance markets emerged. They focused mostly on resurrecting the ACA cost-reduction payments and giving states flexibility to come up with their own ideas, like reinsurance, for shoring up the troubled individual market.

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.

Extending Marketplace Tax Credits Would Make Coverage More Affordable for Middle-Income Adults.

ISSUE: Affordability of health coverage is a growing challenge for Americans facing rising premiums, deductibles, and copayments. The Affordable Care Act's tax credits make marketplace insurance more affordable for eligible lower-income individuals. However, individuals lose tax credits when their income exceeds 400 percent of the federal poverty level, creating a steep cliff. GOALS: To analyze the effects of extending eligibility for tax credits to individuals with incomes above 400 percent of the federal poverty level. METHODS: We used RAND's COMPARE microsimulation model to examine changes in insurance coverage and health care spending. KEY FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS: Extending tax-credit eligibility increases insurance enrollment by 1.2 million, at a total federal cost of $6.0 billion. Those who would benefit from the tax-credit extension are mostly middle-income adults ages 50 to 64. These new enrollees would be healthier than current enrollees their age, which would improve the risk pool and lower premiums. Eliminating the cliff at 400 percent of the federal poverty level is one policy option that may be considered to increase affordability of insurance.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Market Stabilization. Final rule.

This rule finalizes changes that will help stabilize the individual and small group markets and affirm the traditional role of State regulators. This final rule amends standards relating to special enrollment periods, guaranteed availability, and the timing of the annual open enrollment period in the individual market for the 2018 plan year; standards related to network adequacy and essential community providers for qualified health plans; and the rules around actuarial value requirements.

Disaster Averted, For Now: How the American Health Care Act Would Have Affected Californians.

Although the American Health Care Act (AHCA) was recently defeated, the policies in the bill represented a mix of ideas long favored by conservatives. If enacted, this repeal-and-replace bill would have had devastating consequences for most of the 5 million Californians currently receiving direct benefits from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including more than 1 million who receive subsidies through Covered California and almost 4 million who have enrolled in the Medi-Cal expansion. Although the bill failed to garner enough votes for passage, it is likely that efforts to chip away at the ACA will continue and that some of the ideas contained within the AHCA will be revisited. This policy brief summarizes some of the most significant reversals that would have occurred under the Republican plan in the individual and small group insurance markets.