I chased my kids through a museum yesterday. Part of the day had them go through a butterfly’s life cycle and there were parts where grown-ups were just too big for it. So I stepped aside and thought about health policy. Specifically the proposed rule that widens the actuarial value bands from +/-2 to -4/+2. …
Competency and conscience
I want to highlight two events from yesterday. First James Joyner’s response to the mass resignation of the membership of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: That’ll teach him. Now he’ll have to pack the commission with people hand-picked by Steve Bannon. https://t.co/1jGxMx780u — James Joyner (@DrJJoyner) February 17, 2017 …
A question for Doug J
Yesterday, Politico highlighted my post on the distributional impacts of expanding actuarial bands. I like that piece a lot. It gets into the weeds very quickly on a relevant policy discussion and illuminates some of the trade-offs and quirks of the structure. Politico highlights a couple of writers a day. These links and names get …
Governing is hard
The Republican Party has an ACA problem. The ACA is deficit reducing. Most of that was because it raised taxes on upper income families and cut back Medicare reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage. The Republicans are ideologically indifferent to cutting back Medicare Advantage reimbursement rates especially as Medicare Advantage has continued to grow in popularity so …
Deliberately choosing bad risk pools
Bloomberg’s Zachary Tracer has a good review of the impact of Humana leaving the Exchange market with a focus on eastern Tennessee. At least 40,000 people in the Knoxville area may have no health plans to pick from in the Affordable Care Act’s markets after insurer Humana Inc. opted to pull out from all 11 …
A BFD that passed amongst the chaos
In most strands of the multi-verse, the below would have sent the health wonk community ablaze. Instead in this strand, we spent all day yesterday talking about a proposed rule from CMS and generally shaking our head as our government continues to say “Hold my beer and watch this….” But this is normally a BFD: …
Distributional consequences of widening AV bands
One of the major proposals in the draft Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rule that was released on the 15th is to increase the de minimas allowed actuarial value band. Currently the regulation allows a plan to be included in a metal band if it is within two Actuarial Value (AV) points of …
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