How bout adding a Medicare advantage to the ACA Marketplace?

The main purpose of the public option was to dive down the cost of insurance in the individual market by making it available through a plan that would pay Medicare rates to providers, rather than the much higher rates usually paid in the commercial market.

There are other ways to do that. In the Medicare Advantage program, insurers pay providers rates that are by all accounts very close to those paid by traditional Medicare. At healthinsurance.org, I delve into a proposal to accomplish that goal by indirection, via a relatively simple rule change. The proposal comes from  Jon Kingsdale, a health insurance industry veteran who was the founding executive director of the Massachusetts Connector, the insurance exchange established under Romneycare, prototype of the ACA marketplace. Here's the upshot:

Too many choices on ACA exchanges?

The Health Exchange Summit held in Washington, D.C. May 11-13 brought together many of the people most directly engaged in implementation of the Affordable Care Act. All, excepting Michael Cannon,  mastermind of the King v. Burwell suit seeking to cripple the ACA, are committed to extending access to affordable and effective health care to as many Americans as possible and to to making the ACA work effectively.

Given that commitment, I was struck by a persistent chord of uneasiness about the complexity of insurance choices facing Americans. That uneasiness was literally the keynote, delivered by Princeton healthcare economist Uwe Reinhardt, whose  presentation might have been titled, "Why we can't have nice things like the Swiss."  Switzerland's health insurance system served as something of a model for the ACA, as citizens are mandated to purchase private health insurance on an exchange, with the help of means-tested premium subsidies. Reinhardt's presentation drove home the dazzling simplicity of a Swiss health insurance exchange, displayed on screen -- in which  dozens of insurers compete but all offer a standard benefit package

Reinhardt suggested that Americans are unduly enamored by choice, which breeds complexity. Research shows he said, that "People can't choose among more than 5 items. Offering 130 health plans is a prescription for disaster." The Swiss, he said, have never heard of an insurance broker. and the U.S. system would not need navigators if the choice were simple enough. He mocked federalist claims that states need to develop solutions that fit local conditions by flashing photos of identical McDonald's in Massachusetts and Tennessee.

Reinhardt is fond of expressing exasperated bemusement at all things American. Perhaps more surprising was the wistfulness expressed by the second keynote, healthcare consultant Jon Kingsdale, who was the founding executive director of the Massachusetts Connector when Romneycare was implemented. When the Massachusetts Connector first went live, Kingsdale said, "people would come up to me at parties and say, 'this is great -- it's so easy.'" Not so with the ACA.  Gearing up for Year 3, "instead of focusing on how to delight customers, we're still worried about how to get the goddamned back end working."