AHCA and Autoenrollment

There has been talk that the Senate is talking about auto-enrollment as the Senate Republican caucus is chewing over the AHCA bill that the House passed. I think there are two major show stoppers to auto-enrollment in a Senate Republican reconciliation bill.

Let us assume that any auto-enrollment process looks something like that in Cassidy-Collins. That bill contained significant language that most likely would be ruled as not germane to the revenues or expenditures. It sets up significant number of rules and requirements for what an auto-enrolled plan had to cover.

More prosaically, I am having a hard time seeing this work if we use the auto-enrollment proposal in Cassidy-Collins and the subsidy levels in the current AHCA ($2,000 for 29 and under, $2,500 for 30-39, $3,000 for 40-49, $3,500 for 50-59, $4,000 for 60+) as any reasonable estimate of uptake would cost a tremendous amount of money.

The challenge of grafting Collins-Cassidy auto-enrollment into the AHCA is one of funding. The CBO projected that the AHCA would leave 24 million more people uninsured compared to current law. That would leave 52 million people uninsured according to the March 2017 CBO analysis. There are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants of which some have health coverage through some means. Let’s work with 42 million people under the AHCA would be eligible for a credit.

Right now the AHCA has a net deficit savings of $150 billion dollars over ten years. That will decrease when CBO releases a revised score. But let’s keep things simple. If we assume an average $3,000 subsidy and an opt-out rate similar to Medicare Part A (<1%) an opt-out program costs $125 billion dollars per year or $1.25 trillion dollars over ten years. An opt-out program forces the AHCA to either reduce the value of the monthly subsidy to a trifling average amount ($30 per person per month) or actually make the AHCA a healthcare bill and get rid of all the tax cuts. And even then, the actuarial value of the coverage that can be funded with the AHCA credits is much lower than the the actuarial value of the ACA plans.

Universal coverage at any level that is greater than giving people three aspirins and telling them to rub some dirt on it is expensive. It is a legitimate debate as to whether or not we want low actuarial value catastrophic plans with near universal coverage in all states through an opt-out plan or scattered results ranging from higher actuarial plans in Massachusetts to one in five people in Texas still being uninsured due to opt-in plan and state policy choices. Those are legitimate questions but unless the Senate completely junks everything in the AHCA, opt-out plans don’t fit in any context that is defined by the AHCA.