Thursday, June 29, 2017

The party of Cost Sharing Inflation

When House Republicans sued the Obama administration in 2014 to stop federal payments to health insurers for Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies in the ACA marketplace, the simple goal was sabotage: use any tool that came to hand to hobble the markets.  (That goes as well for refusing to appropriate the budgeted funds for CSR.)

At the same time, I suggest today in a healthinsurance.org piece that will be out this morning, this particular bit of legal vandalism made ideological sense, in that Republicans do not believe in cost sharing reduction. They believe in cost sharing inflation: if each of us pays a higher percentage of our medical costs, we'll demand better prices for care, and prices will go down.

This ideology is fully expressed in the BCRA, which asks low income people to swap out Medicaid coverage, or CSR-enhanced marketplace coverage at AV 94% or 87%, for coverage at AV 58%. That's a feature, not a bug. Hope you'll take a look

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