Do we want hospitals and doctors to take on risk?

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Getting incentives right is always hard

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, has posted a three-part series surveying twelve years of healthcare payment reform projects seeded by the Affordable Care Act and overseen by the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). Part 2 focuses on the one notable success among those projects: The welding in 2014 of Maryland’s state-wide all-payer system to a global budget for each hospital that rises slightly below the inflation rate annually. In 2019 the state further expanded the global budget sphere with a Total Cost of Care Model, which sets a per capita limit on Medicare total cost of care in Maryland and provides incentives for hospitals and doctors to coordinate care, reduce hospitalization rates and meet other quality measures.

Goozner notes that according to CMS analysis, “In the eight years since Maryland began global budgeting, the program has saved the federal government well over $1 billion compared to Medicare spending in other states.”

In Part 3, Goozner leans into the premise that not only uniform payment rates and global budgets are essential to effective healthcare cost control, but also “convincing providers to take on risk is key.” That is, providers must be on the hook if per-patient costs exceed targets.

I have a question about that.

11 states where higher-income ACA marketplace enrollees went for cheap gold plans

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(Program note: the second part of this post looks at 11 states where gold plan selection was highest in 2022. If you've no use for my musings on what ACA markets should look like, skip down to the subhead "Top gold plan markets in 2022" below.)

Having spent much of Saturday looking into gold plan selection in the ACA marketplace in 2022 (it's at a record level), I found myself musing on Sunday morning that an ideal metal level distribution, in very broad outline, would be silver for low income, gold for the middle class, and bronze for the wealthy.

Silver at low incomes, because Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR), available only with silver plans, is such a huge value-add for enrollees with incomes up to 200% FPL, rendering silver plans roughly platinum-equivalent at no additional cost to the enrollee. Silver plans are now free for enrollees with incomes up to 150% FPL and available for no more than 2% of income up to 200% FPL. They should be the near-universal choice up to that threshold (alas, they're not).

What's the effect of a gold benchmark in the ACA marketplace? Three states tell a tale. And a platinum benchmark is coming.

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Bloomberg's Sara Hansard reports that six states have now taken action to require insurers in their ACA marketplaces to price plans in strict proportion to their actuarial value -- that is, to increase the effects of silver loading. (Actuarial value (AV) refers to the percentage of the average enrollees costs the plan is designed to cover, in percentages fixed by metal level.)

Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia required strict silver loading in 2021 (and some or all in years prior). New Mexico and Colorado have new regulations going into effect in 2022. Texas has passed a law requiring the state insurance commissioner to take the value of Cost Sharing Reduction (added to silver plans only) into account during rate review.

Silver loading as mandated in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia makes gold plans at least marginally cheaper than silver plans, increasing value for enrollees with incomes above 200% of the Federal Poverty Level ($25,520 for an individual in 2021). Below that income threshold, Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) raises the actuarial value of silver plans to a roughly platinum level.

Who'd be hurt by restored federal CSR funding? A snapshot from Maryland

Update: snapshot from Rhode Island added at bottom, 3/19.

Based on 2017 ACA marketplace enrollment data, Aviva Aron-Dine of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that as many as 36% of marketplace enrollees might be harmed if federal funding for Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payments is restored by Congress. That's an upper bound, if all who could potentially benefit in 2018 by switching from silver plans to other metal levels did so. It comes to about 22% of all individual market enrollees, since about 40% of those in ACA-compliant plans bought their plans off-exchange -- and so are ineligible for subsidies.

One sample of data already available for 2018 -- Maryland's -- indicates that Aron-Dine's estimates are on target. I have something of a quibble with how the potentially harmed population is defined, however.

Mysteries of the Maryland ACA Marketplace, cont.

As I noted on Oct. 3, Maryland Health Connection, the state's ACA exchange, sent me enrollment data indicating that Maryland may have the highest "CSR takeup rate" in the country. That is, in 2015, Maryland private plan buyers whose incomes qualify them for Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies, which are available only with silver plans, chose silver and access the benefit at market leading rates. In Maryland, 86% of CSR-eligible buyers chose silver, compared to a national average of about 76%. That's doubtless in large part because Maryland cloned the web interface of the Connecticut exchange, which does an excellent job steering CSR-eligibles toward silver.

There are some peculiarities in the Maryland data, though, and they're thrown into sharper relief by the raw numbers of silver plan enrollees at each income level, which I did not have when I posted last week. Chief among them is a relatively huge number of buyers, 22%, with incomes low enough to qualify them for Medicaid, unless they're lawfully present non-citizens not yet eligible for Medicaid because they've been in the country less than five years.

Why inner city hospitals move to greener pastures

Kaiser Health News' Phil Galewitz has a story about inner city urban hospitals that are moving, or seeking to move, to greener pastures -- that is, into nearby suburbs:

By moving to wealthier areas, hospitals can reduce the percent of uninsured and lower-paying Medicaid patients, while increasing the proportion of privately insured patients—what hospitals refer to as attracting better “payer mix."

The "payer mix" concept reminds me of the old joke about economists. A research team made fifty people sit on blocks of ice and another fifty on radiators. On average, they were comfortable.

Hospitals serve people whose payers pay too much and others who pay too little. On average, if their administrators jigger things right (and their location allows, or can be changed), they're comfortable -- often very comfortable, nonprofit or no. The mix includes providing as many high margin procedures as possible -- "such as transplants, cardiac surgery, cancer treatments, and CT, MRI, and other imaging," as Ezekiel Emanuel summarizes in Reinventing American Healthcare (2014). But it also includes minimizing charity care and Medicaid and, to a lesser extent, Medicare in favor of privately insured -- or, best case, wealthy foreign uninsured -- patients.

Maryland's low income ACA customers benefit from Connecticut's site design

Maryland's ACA exchange was a disaster last year, so the state started over, creating a freely offered clone of the highly successful Connecticut exchange. That's worked out very well.

Charles Gaba reports that Maryland is one of 18 states that have exceeded HHS's goal for private plan enrollments in 2015.  As of January 11, Maryland has enrolled 91,137 residents in private plans, versus 67,757 in the first open season that ended last April.

Equally importantly. the Maryland exchange has strongly boosted the percentage of plan buyers who selected silver-level plans and reduced the percentage that bought bronze -- the lowest level, with deductibles averaging over $5,000 for a single enrollee. In 2014, just 49% of Maryland private plan customers bought  silver, and 31% bought bronze. That's in contrast to 65% silver/20% bronze breakdown in the nation as a whole,and 69%/17% in the 36 states using healthcare.gov.  This year so far, Maryland's silver plan takeup has risen to 61%, while bronze takeup has dropped to 23%.*