Axios this morning: David Anderson, the former health insurance official who writes a thoughtful health care blog called Balloon Juice, has a fascinating account of one reason the Iowa individual health insurance market is having problems. There’s one person with a severe genetic disorder whose medical care costs about $1 million a month — $12 …
Cost clustering and high cost risk pools
My Iowa post last week got a whole lot more attention than I thought it would have and provoked several great conversations. One of the questions was about how to deal with this extreme corner case and if a high cost risk pool made sense for this use case. This is the perfect example for …
Cost clustering and high cost risk poolsPost + Comments (21)
Catching the falling knife in Iowa
Iowa’s Exchange market is in trouble. Right now there looks to be one insurer, Medica, that will cover most of the state. I think this is a stable equilibrium. But what is going on in Iowa that makes it such a stressed out state. It has some of the typical problems with large transitional, underwritten …
I said hey, hey hey, what’s going on
What’s happening here? Report: Jason Chaffetz expected to resign as early as tomorrow — Charles Clymer (@cmclymer) April 20, 2017 If he resigns tomorrow, he went from being a powerful committee chair to a lurking presence in the 2020 Utah governor’s race to a schmuck in a week or so. What is going on here? …
Basic Health Plans and hoping for chaos
States that want to start a Basic Health Plan in 2019 have an incentive to root for non-fatal market chaos in 2018 rate filings. The Basic Health Plan (BHP) is effectively enhanced Medicaid Managed Care for the Exchange population that earns less than 200% of the Federal Poverty Level. States receive 95% of the funds …
Third time’s a harm
The Huffington Post has the outline of yet another Republican healthcare deal: he deal, brokered between House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Tuesday Group co-chairman Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), would allow states to get waivers eliminating the so-called community rating provision ― the rule that prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums to people with …
More churn than a butter factory
Two conservative health policy wonks are outlining an auto-enrollment option that is philosophically aligned with what is in the Collins-Cassidy draft bill state option. I don’t have an intrinsic problem with auto-enrollment with an opt-out. I have a major pragmatic problem with their proposal. But let’s look at the core of their program: Congress should …