On adding an out-of-pocket cost cap to traditional Medicare

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Medicare's annual Open Enrollment Period is in progress, and enrollment in Medicare Advantage (MA) is poised to exceed enrollment in traditional, fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare for the first time in 2023. Stat's Bob Herman spotlights advocates' case for erasing MA's most consequential competitive advantage by adding an annual out-of-pocket cost cap (OOP cap) to traditional, fee-for-service Medicare:

At least 1 in 5 people* who choose Medicare Advantage — the alternative to traditional Medicare that is operated by health insurance companies — say they choose it because of the out-of-pocket limits that insurers offer, according to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate, as of 2018, about one in six FFS Medicare enrollees (counting only those enrolled in both Part A and Part B**) lacked an OOP cap and were thus exposed to potentially catastrophic out-of-pocket costs. That comes to about 5 million enrollees in 2022. The other 25 million FFS enrollees in Parts A  and B have access to OOP caps -- usually quite low --  via either Medigap, an employer-sponsored supplemental plan, or dual eligibility in Medicare and Medicaid.

In a study commissioned by America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Wakely actuaries calculated that adding a $6,700 OOP cap to FFS Medicare Parts A and B would increase per-person spending by 3.5%. Wakely cast that estimate as conservative, as it does not include an estimate of "induced demand"-- i.e., enrollees using more care because it's more affordable. A June 2022 Urban Institute analysis bears that out. Urban estimated the cost of a $7,550 cap -- the highest currently allowable by MA plans for in-network care -- at $25 billion per year, a 5% increase. But that cap is inclusive of Part D, which according to Urban's estimate accounts for about 18% of cost increases. A $7,550 cap for Parts A and B alone would presumably increase FFS costs by about 4%. Urban estimates that induced demand triggered by a $7,550 cap will increase total spending by all payers by $8 billion, or 1.6% (perhaps 1.3% with Part D omitted).  That added cost (not accounted for by Wakely) does seem to bring the Urban and Wakely estimates more or less in line. 

Of index investing and traditional Medicare

For some time, a kind of inverted analogy between index fund investing and Traditional Medicare has been flickering round the edges of my mind, so let's see where it leads.

I was very impressed by a forecast I heard almost exactly eight years ago (Suzanne Duncan of the IBM Institute for Business Value)  that within 20 years, 85-90% of assets under management would be invested in passive vehicles -- that is, index funds or institutional equivalents. And in fact, in 2015, passive funds accounted for a third of U.S. mutual fund assets, up from a quarter three years prior.

For individual investors, and for most institutional investors, the shift to passive investment makes excellent sense. It's almost impossible for a portfolio of actively managed funds to beat an index portfolio over time. Just today, the Wall Street Journal reports, "Over the 15 years ended in December 2016, 82% of all U.S. funds trailed their respective benchmarks, according to the latest S&P Indices Versus Active funds scorecard."  And of course, index funds retain a huge fee advantage, since they don't have to pay managers for their acumen -- the funds change their investments automatically to mirror a predetermined basket of equities or bonds.

Someone has to make active decisions that determine prices, however, thereby creating the indexes that passive investors rely on. That means investing in research, complex mathematical analysis, and, sometimes at least, intuition born of lived experience.  What happens when the indexed values are produced by managers investing, say, just 5% of all assets under management? Isn't that a rather small brain moving a dinosaur? Is a smaller herd of decision-makers likelier to stampede in destructive directions?

Conversely, Medicare Advantage -- what you might call actively managed healthcare for seniors -- is grabbing a growing share of the Medicare market, now up to 32% of the whole, up from 22% in 2008.