As I was putting on my cap and my wife her kerchief before we settled down for a long summer nap, a health policy colleague messaged me. They were trying to wrap their head around the distributional consequences of a variety of Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) loading schemes.
The short version is that people who make under 150% Federal Poverty Line (FPL) won’t be touched. After that it gets a little messy.
The three basic scenarios are business as usual. I don’t think think that will apply as Congress won’t have time to appropriate funding and insurers won’t have the time to change their pricing. The other two options are basically a broad load where the cost of CSR is placed into every plan. Every plan will increase by some percentage over and above the normal medical trend increases. The third option is to only load the cost of CSR subsidies to Silver plans. There is a sub-variant that only loads these costs to on-Exchange Silver but that is a minor albeit important variation.
So what happens?
Distributional impacts of CSR loading schemesPost + Comments (11)