As most people know, Senator McCain (R-AZ) had surgery on Friday to address a blood clot. He is in Arizona for at least a week to recover. Senate Majority Leader McConnell has rescheduled the vote on the BCRA for a week. So what do we know now: 1) Paul and Collins are hard “No” who …
Financial engineering in the ACA
Sometimes it is nice to see good empirical work confirm expectations. The ACA subsidy structure has a hard start-point and a hard shut-off point (100% to 400% Federal Poverty Level). We should expect to see people who are just outside of that range work really hard to get inside of that range. We would really …
Competition policy for procedures
The first rule of thumb for a health insurer trying to minimize claims expenditures is to keep people out of the hospital. Everything in the hospital has a higher contract rate than the exact same service fifty feet down the street at a non-hospital clinic. Huge from CMS today – CMS proposes to remove total …
Simple policy explainers
Wow… the American Academy of Actuaries is cold in their policy analysis of the Cruz plan If some plans were allowed to avoid the ACA rules altogether, then plans competing to enroll the same participants wouldn’t be competing under the same rules. Noncompliant plans would likely be structured to be attractive to low-cost enrollees, through …
Medicaid and private insurance
Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt have an excellent piece asking the question if people on Medicaid would be better off than people on private insurance. is having Medicaid, as those critics also say, much worse than having private insurance? …it’s far from proven that Medicaid is worse than private insurance. A lot depends on what …
Churn is expensive pain
A new paper came out that looked at individuals with depression who were covered by Medicaid. ** The paper looks at breaks in coverage and what happens to people when they get back onto Medicaid. It is both a painful humanitarian diseaster and expensive as hell. Outcome Measures: Emergency department (ED) visits, inpatient episodes, inpatient …
Medicaid retroactive eligibility or bad debt
Dylan Scott at Vox last week had a great piece on Medicaid changes in the Senate bill that are not getting headline attention. I want to pay attention to retroactive eligibility: 2) Retroactive eligibility The Senate bill also repeals what’s known as retroactive eligibility — a wonky but important provision for new Medicaid enrollees. Under …
Medicaid retroactive eligibility or bad debtPost + Comments (12)