• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓
  • ←
  • →

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

This fight is for everything.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Republicans in disarray!

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Mobile Menu

  • 4 Directions VA 2025 Raffle
  • 2025 Activism
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • 2025 Activism
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • Targeted Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Anderson On Health Insurance / Pricing matters

Pricing matters

by David Anderson|  April 3, 20189:04 am| 7 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance

FacebookTweetEmail

At the Health Affairs Blog, I looked at the on-Exchange enrollment changes in 2018 stratified by the type of exchange and the state strategy for dealing with the termination of Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies.

This is the money exhibit:

 

Unsurprisingly, to me at least, pricing matters. Silver Loading, the CSR strategy that placed all of the CSR costs into the Silver plans, saw the comparatively best results.  I believe this is because Silver Loading strategies lowers the relative price of Bronze and Gold plans while holding Silver plan premiums constant for subsidized buyers.  Lower prices for two plan categories and constant pricing for the third should lead to some increased demand.

Silver Loading was not a panacea for enrollment.  Silver Loaded states saw a 3% enrollment decline as a whole but there were some states with significant enrollment gains.  I thought that the split in experience between Healthcare.gov states and state branded website states to be interesting as well.  I am using state branded websites as a mental proxy for local support for the ACA (Idaho is a notable exception).  I think that local support and better pricing will produce better results than less local support and more federal counter-messaging to enrollment despite better pricing.

But the short story is the expected story: prices matter.

FacebookTweetEmail
Previous Post: « Plan domination and the Gold Gap Strategy
Next Post: RSS: The Fixening? »

Reader Interactions

7Comments

  1. 1.

    Amir Khalid

    April 3, 2018 at 9:13 am

    I don’t know why, but your graph isn’t loading for me.

  2. 2.

    Yutsano

    April 3, 2018 at 9:34 am

    @Amir Khalid: Same. I thought maybe it was the browser but I’m not even getting the metadata.

  3. 3.

    Yarrow

    April 3, 2018 at 9:36 am

    @Amir Khalid: It’s not loading for me either. I clicked through to the linked article and there are several images, but I’m not sure if one of those is the one that’s supposed to be linked here.

    Edit: Looks like it’s fixed now.

  4. 4.

    Yarrow

    April 3, 2018 at 9:39 am

    David, I have a question. As a consumer going on the exchange looking for a health insurance plan, are we supposed to be able to see Silver Gap vs Silver Loading vs whatever else kind of Silver plan? As far as I could tell, the plans were just gold, silver, bronze.

  5. 5.

    David Anderson

    April 3, 2018 at 10:07 am

    @Yarrow: No, you won’t see anything labelled as Silver Load or Silver Gap.

    You’ll see Silver plans with a premium and everything else is language that nerds have developed to describe the relationship and rationale of Silver prices to everything else.

  6. 6.

    dnfree

    April 3, 2018 at 10:12 am

    There was an article from the Washington Post today about how most people believe the individual market is failing. (Most people of course don’t follow Balloon-Juice.) What ways are there to inform the general public of the situation, and what’s working and what isn’t, and how it should be improved? This is one of the biggest failings of the news media.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-health-202/2018/04/03/the-health-202-half-of-americans-think-obamacare-marketplaces-are-crumbling/5ac26e2b30fb042a378a301e/

  7. 7.

    David Anderson

    April 3, 2018 at 12:10 pm

    @dnfree: Pricing in November when people enter their information and see their premiums about the same as last year if they get subsidies.

Comments are closed.

Primary Sidebar

On The Road - BarcaChicago  - Off the Gunflint Trail/Boundary Waters 7
Image by BarcaChicago (7/17/25)
Donate

Recent Comments

  • Soapdish on Thursday Night Open Thread (Jul 17, 2025 @ 8:18pm)
  • zhena gogolia on Thursday Night Open Thread (Jul 17, 2025 @ 8:15pm)
  • zhena gogolia on Thursday Night Open Thread (Jul 17, 2025 @ 8:13pm)
  • Miss Bianca on Thursday Night Open Thread (Jul 17, 2025 @ 8:12pm)
  • AM in NC on GOP Venality Open Thread: The Emil Bove Nomination (Jul 17, 2025 @ 8:11pm)

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
No Kings Protests June 14 2025

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)
Fix Nyms with Apostrophes

Social Media

Balloon Juice
WaterGirl
TaMara
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
DougJ NYT Pitchbot
mistermix

Keeping Track

Legal Challenges (Lawfare)
Republicans Fleeing Town Halls (TPM)
21 Letters (to Borrow or Steal)
Search Donations from a Brand

Donate

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2025 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc

Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!

Email sent!