Via the Washington Post there was another anti-trust win last night. The Anthem-Cigna merger was denied. Anthem wants to appeal the decision but Cigna might want to walk away. “The evidence has also shown that the merger is likely to result in higher prices, and that it will have other anticompetitive effects: it will eliminate …
Trump Insurance rules
Politico evidently got their hands on a leaked draft rule making document for the insurance exchanges. There are a couple of significant tweaks in the rules. The most important thing so far is that the draft document accepts the ACA as it is and works on the margins. It is not an attempt to blow …
A little tweak for better care
Indiana submitted its Healthy Indiana Program 2.0 (HIP 2.0) HSA based Medicaid waiver for an extension last week. One of the tweaks that they want that should be completely non-controversial is a change to the IMD exclusion. Through this waiver extension application, the State seeks to address the substantial drug abuse epidemic facing the State …
4.29% enrollment loss is the cost of Trump’s First Day EO
I’ve been playing a bit more with the 2016 and 2017 QHP data in an attempt to figure out the incremental cost of the Trump Executive order. I think 4.25% is a good lower estimate. My data is still here: Data and Methods I again excluded Kentucky and Louisiana. Kentucky was switching from Kynect to …
4.29% enrollment loss is the cost of Trump’s First Day EOPost + Comments (34)
Partisanship and enrollment changes on Healthcare.gov
Charles Gaba outlines what happened on Healthcare.gov for final enrollment. The numbers came in lighter than expected. Then, Donald Trump actually took office…and in a one-two punch, not only signed an executive order which specifically instructed the HHS Dept. to do everything in their power to sabotage the implementation of the ACA, but also attempted …
Partisanship and enrollment changes on Healthcare.govPost + Comments (13)
Linking subsidies to price paper
NBER** has a really interesting (to me) paper on the economic and policy ramifications of linking subsidies to a non-fixed price versus a subsidy that is independent of price. This is very important to my thinking because my Silver Gap and Silver Spam ideas are effectively hacks that exploit the problems that this paper identifies …
One to ponder
Major corporations with large market research budgets have decided that it is totally fine to oppose Trump and his policies — Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) February 6, 2017 For forty four and half states, that is the most important thing to think about tonight. For the other 5.5 states and their diaspora, we’ll process that point …