Grandpa's Spells wrote:Turdacious wrote:nafod Wasserman-Schultz wrote:TerryB wrote:Obama said the risk corridors would be budget neutral.
Republicans put language in the budget to be sure they would be.
No, they put language in the budget to insure if the budget wasn't neutral, that the US Government would not make good on its obligation.
Risk is adversity/positivity of outcome x probability of outcome. What the congress really did is jack up the adversity side of the outcome, distorting the whole risk thing. The market shall now speak.
The market has been speaking for years. The individual market was failing before that budget language was approved by Congress and the POTUS, and failing after.
This is a popular talking point on the right, but the CBO says otherwise.
The risk corridor change annoyed the major insurers, but hammered the small and mid-sized insurers who were dumb enough to participate in the individual market. With a few notable exceptions (like the California market), there are problems in the market that should concern both the left and the right including:
1. The number of markets with a single insurance provider (including most rural markets). There's also the gerrymandering they did early on that favored urban (i.e. blue) markets unfairly
2. The number of markets where states have to beg providers to keep them there
3. High churn among customers in the subsidized individual market.
https://t.co/nMtuprptgh (see slide 9 especially)
4. The amount of cost shifting going on between categories of insurance (especially regarding kidney disease)
5. HHS' watering down and removing of incentives to stay insured (like weak enforcement of mandates and allowing people to maintain coverage for
three months after stopping payment). One of the only thing saving insurers is that most people don't understand that they can get 12 months of insurance for the price of nine.
5. Finally there's this (not the greatest summary, read the whole thing)
A "death spiral" is a technical term that comes from the days when carriers could underwrite risk and exclude sick people from their programs and is analogous to the process of an airplane climbing to a high altitude, losing control, and, being unable to regain lift, spiraling down to the ground [...]
I can tell you that I have talked to a number of health plans that are telling me that when the big rate increases became effective on January 1, 2017, their off-exchange net enrollment shrunk between 15% and 35%. The carriers are also telling me that their off exchange medical loss ratios are just as bad as the on-exchange business. And, the Aetna CEO certainly knew about the medical loss ratio on his off-exchange block when he made his comments.
We won't know if 2017's big off-exchange cancellations are part of a death spiral in this half of Obamacare until we see a few years of data and can look back at the complete picture. But this does have all of the classic characteristics of a spiral––big rate increases pushing the people who don't need heath insurance this year off the program leaving the sick people who do need it in a program where those quitting now can be guaranteed of coming back next January if they get sick.
http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.c ... .html#more
Whether or not the AHCA was an improvement over Obamacare is a good topic for debate, but that doesn't mean that Obamacare isn't a dumpster fire.
"Liberalism is arbitrarily selective in its choice of whose dignity to champion." Adrian Vermeule
