So, I wrote my first Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post yesterday...

Harris’s rollout Monday was met with swift criticism from both the Biden camp, which called it “A Bernie Sanders-lite Medicare for All,” and the Sanders camp, which insists Harris “can’t call [her] plan Medicare for All.”

In saying this, the Sanders campaign is effectively trying to lay a copyright claim to Medicare-for-all, as if it, and only it, can define what it means. The reality is far less clear — and depending on your perspective, it could be Harris’s proposal that is more justified in claiming the Medicare-for-all branding.

I'm not going to overquote my own piece, but this has led to some backlash against me, so for the record:

Last month I noted that Maine's Bureau of Professional & Financial Regulation released their preliminary 2020 rate filings for the Individual and Small Group markets. At the time, the three carriers on their Indy market were requesting average rate increases of around 4.7% next year.

Well, the final/approved rate changes won't happen for another month or so, but it looks like the carriers themselves have sliced their unsubsidized 2020 rates down of their own volition:

Maine’s three providers of individual health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace have revised their rate requests for 2020, significantly lowering their projected rates.

Previously, the insurers had sought modest average rate increases of 1 percent to 8 percent. Under the revised filings, two of the three insurers are now requesting decreases for individual plans, and the other is seeking an increase of less than 1 percent.

The Arkansas Insurance Dept. just posted their preliminary 2020 individual and small group market premium rate change requests. For the most part it's pretty straightforward: Individual market premiums are increasing about 2.3% statewide, while small group plans are going up 6.5% overall.

However, there's two interesting things to note about Arkansas' individual market: First, unlike most states where over 70% of enrollees do so through the ACA exchange, in Arkansas it's more like 20%, with nearly 80% are enrolled off-exchange. The main reason for this is the state's unique "Private Option" Medicaid expansion waiver, in which around 252,000 residents who would otherwise be enrolled in Medicaid itself are instead enrolled in enhanced ACA individual market policies...with the state paying for their premiums.

(IMPORTANT: As my friend Shawn Pierce keeps pointing out, the phrase "Medicare for All" has two very different meanings...one is the brand "Medicare for All", which simply refers to any healthcare plan which ensures 100% universal, comprehensive healthcare coverage for everyone; the other is the specific bills introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and/or Rep. Pramila Jayapal, which would indeed completely eliminate private major medical insurance for 100% of the population as well as completely eliminating all out-of-pocket costs in favor of 100% federal public funding).

For months now, California Senator and Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has repeatedly struggled with how to address her support of Bernie Sanders' 100% mandatory, $0 out-of-pocket-cost, 100% comprehensive "pure" single payer "Medicare for All" healthcare bill.

A new analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research has quantified something which healthcare advocates have been arguing for years:

The United States could have averted about 15,600 deaths if all 50 states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, new research suggests.

...As of 2019, 36 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Medicaid expansion, and 14 have not.

Four researchers — University of Michigan economist Sarah Miller, University of California, Los Angeles public health scholar Laura Wherry, National Institutes of Health’s Sean Altekruse and Norman Johnson with the US Census Bureau — used that difference to study what happened to people’s health outcomes in states that expanded the program compared to those that did not. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research details their results.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Since June 2019, I've been contracted with the Center for American Progress to provide healthcare data analysis & advocacy on their behalf on a part-time basis.

UPDATE: My contract with CAP ended on Nov. 30th, 2020 (on a positive note--I knew going in it was a temporary arrangement and enjoyed working with them).

NOTE: This is not an in-depth analysis, for three reasons:

  • Third, I have a bit of a personal/household crisis to deal with this week (don't worry...no one's sick, dead or getting divorced, but our house is in need of some serious attention)

If you've been reading my site for more than a couple of years, you know that back in February 2018 I fell in love (well, mostly) with a new Universal Healthcare Coverage proposal from the Center for American Progress called "Medicare Extra for All" or simply "Medicare Extra".

I wasn't expecting my analysis of Rhode Island's 2020 ACA premium changes to be of any particular interest; it's a small state with only two carriers offering individual market policies, after all, so there's not usually much to it.

When I last checked in on the Ocean State (seriously...that's their official slogan for whatever reason), I had noted that the state Senate had passed a bill (2019-S 0738A) which, if signed into law, would lock in most of the ACA's "Blue Leg" protections, including guaranteed issue, community rating, removal of annual/lifetime coverage caps and so forth.

A week or so ago I reported that Covered California had released their preliminary 2020 ACA individual market premium rate changes, with a record-low 0.8% average increase statewide. They detailed in the report how the combination of reinstating the ACA's individual mandate penalty and using that funding to provide additional financial subsidies to the enrollees lowered the average rate increases from 4.0% to 0.8%, saving unsubsidized enrollees around 3.2 points or $167/year on average.

Today, CoveredCA has posted more details about some of the specifics:

Covered California Releases Regional Data Behind Record-Low 0.8 Percent Rate Change for the Individual Market in 2020

I've gotten a lot of praise over the years for my "Psychedelic Donut®" depiction of the total healthcare coverage landscape nationally.

For comparison, here's a similar state-level pie chart from the Vermont Agency of Human Services. It doesn't start out too bad, breaking out the total statewide coverage along the lines of the Donut. As you'd expect, around half the state's 627,000 residents are covered via private insurance (45% via their employer, 5% via the ACA individual market, 1% via "Association Health Plans"), while the other half is mostly covered via Medicare or Medicaid. Vermont has only a 3% uninsured rate.

Back in March, I noted that a federal judge had shot down the Trump Administration's attempt to expand so-called "Association Health Plans", which are quasi-ACA compliant but which also have a long, ugly history of fraud and other abuses:

There is a long history of shady and inept operators of association health plans and related multiple employer welfare arrangements, with dozens of civil and criminal enforcement actions at the state and federal levels. The U.S. Government Accountability Office identified 144 "unauthorized or bogus" plans from 2000 to 2002, covering at least 15,000 employers and more than 200,000 policyholders, leaving $252 million in unpaid medical claims. Some were run as pyramid schemes, while others charged too little for premiums and became insolvent.

...Powerful words from DC District Court Judge John Bates in holding a Trump DOL rule unlawful: "The Final Rule was intended and designed to end run the requirements of the ACA, but it does so only by ignoring the language and purpose of both ERISA and the ACA."

Pages

Advertisement