Health Care Bill & Impact on Elders
It’s not final, it’s not been passed, and changes are likely, but the current health care bill, known as the American Health Care Act, has a significant impact on elders. Last week’s CBO report engendered a lot of discussion about the impact of this new health care proposal. The New York Times ran an article last week discussing it, No Magic in How G.O.P. Plan Lowers Premiums: It Pushes Out Older People. The article explains that lower premiums are on the way for some under this proposal. But, the way the lower premiums are achieved? “[T]he way the bill achieves those lower average premiums has little to do with increased choice and competition. It depends, rather, on penalizing older patients and rewarding younger ones. According to the C.B.O. report, the bill would make health insurance so unaffordable for many older Americans that they would simply leave the market and join the ranks of the uninsured.”
We know that insurers want to have a broad pool to spread the risk. Typically, “older customers cost substantially more to cover than younger ones because they have more health needs and use their insurance more. By discouraging older people from buying insurance, the plan will lower the average sticker price of care.” Ready for some sticker shock? Under the proposal, according to the story, the plan “increases the amount that insurers can charge older customers, and it awards flat subsidies by age, up to an income of $75,000. … On premiums alone, prices would rise by more than 20 percent for the oldest group of customers. By 2026, the budget office projected, ‘premiums in the nongroup market would be 20 percent to 25 percent lower for a 21-year-old and 8 percent to 10 percent lower for a 40-year-old — but 20 percent to 25 percent higher for a 64-year-old.'”
The story explains that it’s not just the premiums that give the whole picture. Tax credits factor into this as well. Here is where the real sticker shock comes in. “[T]he change in tax credits matters more. The combined difference in how much extra the older customer would have to pay for health insurance is enormous. The C.B.O. estimates that the price an average 64-year-old earning $26,500 would need to pay after using a subsidy would increase from $1,700 under Obamacare to $14,600 under the Republican plan.” Did you see that-an increase from $1,700 to $14,600…
The article also discusses out of pocket costs and more. The CBO report in pdf is available here.
The semester is quickly drawing to a close, but the bill could be a basis for an interesting class discussion on social policy, if you have time.