ObamaCare’s impact on health costs.
House Committee on the Education and the Workforce
Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions
Hearing on
“Five Years of Broken Promises:
How the President’s Health Care Law is Affecting America’s Workplaces”
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member, Members of the Committee,
My name is Tevi Troy, and I am the President of the American Health Policy Institute, adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute, and a former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as a former senior White House Domestic Policy Aide. The American Health Policy Institute is a 501(c)3 think tank dedicated to studying the issue of employer sponsored health insurance and highlighting the challenges employers face in offering care to their employees and their dependents. In addition to publishing a variety of studies on employer sponsored health insurance, the Institute also examines employer responses to these challenges and shares best practices from the most successful of these responses. These roles give the Institute a unique perspective on developments in employer sponsored health insurance, and enable it to make recommendations to both policymakers and business leaders regarding
Repealing the ACA’s individual mandate would result in 7 million fewer insured Americans in 2025 but would reduce federal spending on financial assistance by $191 billion, American Action Forum President Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who backs axing the mandate, told the House Ways and Means health subcommittee Tuesday.
Earlier this year the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in King v. Burwell, a case critical to the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or so-called Obamacare). Readers interested in the details of the case should find them elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that the case concerns whether individuals can receive tax credits for buying health insurance on exchanges established by the federal government, though the text of the ACA indicates such subsidies are provided for those buying coverage through an “exchange established by the State.”
The case has the potential to invalidate substantial subsidies now being provided by federal taxpayers to millions of Americans using federal exchanges in 37 different states. Given the uncertainty created by the pending case, legislators on both sides of the aisle are considering how to react to various possible scenarios arising from a court decision. The House and Senate each recently passed budget resolutions allowing budget targets to be revised in the event of subsequent legislation modifying the ACA. The Senate resolution specifies that such legislation must be deficit-neutral.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released early estimates of health insurance and access to health care for January through September 2014. The National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS) is (in my opinion) the most effective survey of health insurance, because it asks people three different but important questions: Are they uninsured at the time of the survey? Have they been uninsured for at least part of the year? Have they been uninsured for more than a year?
As shown in Figure 2, the proportion of long-term uninsured is about the same as it was circa 2000. The proportion of short-term uninsured has shrink a little in Obamacare’s first year.
New analysis from Avalere finds that while exchanges have succeeded in enrolling very low-income individuals, they continue to struggle to attract middle and higher income enrollees.
Specifically, as of the close of the 2015 open enrollment period, exchanges using HealthCare.gov had enrolled 76 percent of eligible individuals with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) or $11,770 to $17,655. However, participation rates declined dramatically as incomes increase and subsidies decrease. For instance, only 16 percent of those earning 301 to 400 percent FPL picked coverage through an exchange, even though they may be eligible for premium subsidies.
“People receiving more generous subsidies are expected to enroll in the exchanges at higher rates. However, participation levels decline as incomes increase, even among individuals who would be eligible for both premium subsidies and cost-sharing reductions,” said Elizabeth Carpenter, director at Avalere.
April 15 is right around the corner, and millions of Americans will find themselves paying more in taxes than ever thanks to Obamacare.
The law is more than a fundamental change to the country’s health care system. It also is a massive tax hike. As The Heritage Foundation’s Federal Budget in Pictures shows, according to the most recent scores, Obamacare will increase taxes by nearly $800 billion for the period of 2013-2022.
Obamacare contains 18 separate tax increases. A few of the biggest include a tax on “Cadillac” health insurance plans, which doesn’t take effect until 2018, long after President Obama and many in Congress who voted for the tax in 2010 have departed Washington. Also, there is a tax on health insurance premiums and a higher rate on the Hospital Insurance payroll tax for single filers with incomes above $200,000 ($250,000 for married filers) that also applies to investment income.
Heather Higgins: The thing that I do that spends actually most of my time and is not something that is terribly sexy for donors, but that I think is hugely important is work on Obamacare. That’s kind of how I backed into the political stuff. I had been very involved in 2009 in trying to help fund and orchestrate and message the entire battle against Obamacare because there was no infrastructure on the right that was really set up to do that. And then coming out of that had the epiphany that since Reid and Pelosi were not moving, maybe the way to do that was to go into the Massachusetts race for Ted Kennedy’s seat, that special election which was being run on the issues that had polled well in September, which were the national security issue and the economy, and instead redefine the race as being about healthcare and the 41st vote, which every political consultant I took that to thought that I was on drugs and that that was a waste of money. So we wound up being the only independent expenditure in Scott Brown’s first race to make it be about healthcare and the 41st vote. [Applause.] Thank you.
And then in the summer of 2010 I was appalled that nobody was talking about Obamacare so we created the Repeal Pledge which is actually the only pledge about Obamacare that still exists of the ones that were started then; and coming out of the 2010 election where we had used it, I looked for the group to join to think strategically about not working at cross purposes between what the Senate might do, the House might do, the court case from Florida that was then rising up to the Supreme Court, what outside grassroots group could do, and there was none. So I’ve started something called the Repeal Coalition which meets every 3 to 4 weeks in the Capitol. It has leadership staff from both the House and the Senate. It has a lot of staff from different Members and Senators. It has a lot of outside groups that are policy wonks to grassroots groups, and we talk about all the things we wish that would get done that don’t get done, and we talk about things that sound like good ideas and figure out if they’re dumb ideas and try and prevent dumb things happening. There is an overriding purpose to this which is remembering, of course, the long-term goal.
During the recent oral argument in King v. Burwell — the Supreme Court case deciding if providing subsidies to buy health insurance in the 36 states utilizing federal health care exchanges is allowed under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — Justice Kennedy suggested that disallowing subsidies might be unconstitutionally coercive because “states are being told either create your own exchange, or we’ll send your insurance market into a death spiral.” Are “death spirals” real, or just a way to frighten the public?
The death spiral will purportedly happen like this: disallowing federal exchange subsidies will make insurance less affordable for the 87% of federal exchange enrollees currently receiving subsidies. These people will no longer be required to buy insurance since the ACA’s individual mandate only applies to individuals who have access to affordable insurance. Since the ACA imposes community rating, requiring roughly the same premium for all individuals in a given plan with only small adjustments for their risk characteristics, and guaranteed issue of insurance regardless of the enrollee’s health, the old and unhealthy will continue to buy coverage but the young and healthy will forego coverage. The resulting higher risk pool of enrollees will increase the average cost of individuals remaining in the non-group insurance market, both on and off the exchanges, resulting in increased premiums that will drive out more low cost, healthy patients eventually destroying the market.
Two economic simulations predict that “adverse selection,” where healthier people leave the insurance market and sicker people stay in causing premiums to rise, will occur if the King plaintiffs prevail. The Urban Institute predicted discontinuing federal exchange subsidies would result in premium increases of 35% and enrollment declines of 69% in the individual health insurance market. The Rand Corporation made similar predictions.
But it is hard to reconcile these forecasts with studies of earlier state insurance market “reforms” that created market conditions similar to those that would result if federal exchange subsidies are disallowed. These studies suggest adverse selection would be minimal and would not lead to a “death spiral,” that is, it would not lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of adverse selection in which each time premiums rise, more people exit, leading to a sicker, more expensive risk pool and market collapse.
Obamacare reached age 5 on Monday [1]. As I’ve pointed out earlier, this anemic child is not exactly a picture of health, falling behind the lofty expectations set for it on many dimensions. But the one bright spot for its proud parents relates to how much the law has reduced the number of uninsured. The president’s Council of Economic Advisors ecstatically announced last December: “the drop in the nation’s uninsured rate so far this year is the largest over any period since the early 1970s.” A little perspective is in order.
First, taking the CEA’s figures at face value (which my chart below does), this decline amounts to a 2.8 percentage point net reduction in the rate of being uninsured, that is, above and beyond the decline that would have occurred anyway according to CBO [2]. It may well be the biggest one-year decline since the 1970′s, but CBO’s expectation at the time the law was passed was that uninsured risk would drop by 6 percentage points in 2014 alone. Even as late as May 2013, CBO was expecting the net decline to be 3.5%. In short, in its first year, Obamacare scored 46% if we use CBO’s original projection as the scoring standard and 79% if we used the May 2013 projection. Clearly we would like this child to perform better than that in future years. But that would require the number of newly covered Americans to increase an additional 79% this year compared to last year.
Reality check: that is certainly not going to happen. Charles Gaba at ACASignups estimates that estimated paid sign-ups on the Exchanges are only 10.5 million so far, compared to 7.06 million last April [the original post stated 10 million, see Update #1 for explanation]. That’s only a 49% increase, suggesting Obamacare will fall even further behind CBO expectations for 2015 [the original post stated 42%, see Update #1 for explanation]. Medicaid won’t fill the gap, since Medicaid evidently is growing by about 300,000 persons per month. Even if we assume all of these are uninsured, that would reduce the uninsured rate by only 0.1% monthly, or 1.2% over 2015 as a whole. That provides only about half of what’s needed to keep pace with CBO projections, leaving the Exchanges to fill the gap. But as we’ve seen, the Exchanges are lagging behind.
The landmark 2006 Massachusetts health-care law that inspired the federal overhaul didn’t lead to a reduction in unnecessary and costly hospitalizations, and it didn’t make the health-care system more fair for minority groups, according to a new study that may hold warnings for the Affordable Care Act.
Massachusetts’ uninsured rate was cut by half to 6 percent in the years immediately following the health-care law signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney. Blacks and Hispanics, who have a harder time accessing necessary medical care, experienced the largest gains in insurance coverage under the Massachusetts law, though they still were more likely to be uninsured than whites.
The new study, published in the BMJ policy journal, examined the rates of hospitalizations for 12 medical conditions that health-care researchers say wouldn’t normally require hospitalization if a patient has good access to primary care. These include hospitalizations for minor conditions like a urinary tract infection, or chronic conditions that would require repeat primary care visits over the course of a year.
“It’s thought to be a good measure and one of the few objective ways of looking at access [to health-care provider] in the community,” said Danny McCormick of Harvard Medical School, the study’s lead author.