CMS Payment Rule Seen as Bad for Some Patients


New final regulations on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchanges issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have drawn mixed reactions from health policy experts and others.

The rule makes a number of changes to the exchanges, including:

  • Expanding the number of “benchmark” plans from which states can choose to model their coverage of the 10 “essential health benefit” (EHB) categories included in the ACA, potentially allowing states to choose plans with more generous or skimpier coverage than is currently offered on their exchanges.
  • Adding several new “hardship exemptions” to allow consumers to avoid paying a penalty for not buying health insurance. One exemption is for consumers who live in an area in which there are no health plans offered for them on the exchange, or only a single plan offered which is unaffordable. Another exemption is for consumers who live in an area in which the only health plans offered provide coverage of abortions, in cases where that conflicts with the consumer’s personal beliefs.
  • Allowing states to adjust the “medical loss ratio,” which determines what percentage of a health insurer’s revenue must be used for paying healthcare costs. Currently, according to the ACA, health insurers must spend at least 80% of their revenue on healthcare claims and quality improvement, with the rest going toward overhead and profit.
  • Increasing the percentage premium increase which requires review by insurance regulators. Under current ACA rules, review is triggered if an insurer requests to increase rates by an average of 10% or more; the new regulations increase that threshold to 15%.

“The final rule will mitigate the harmful impacts of Obamacare and empower states to regulate their insurance market,” CMS said Monday in a press release on the regulations. “The rule will do this by advancing the Administration’s goals to increase state flexibility, improve affordability, strengthen program integrity, empower consumers, promote stability, and reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The release also asserted that the ACA “has led to higher premiums and fewer choices” and that the ACA “has priced many consumers out of the insurance market.”

Premium Increases for Comprehensive Plans

“The plan to allow the sale of policies with skimpier essential health benefits will inevitably cause premiums for good health insurance policies (the kind currently available through the ACA) to increase,” Diana Zuckerman, PhD, president of the National Center for Health Research, an organization that conducts, analyzes, and explains health-related research, wrote in an email.

“If very healthy people can buy skimpy health insurance policies, then people who know that they have health problems will be the only ones buying the better policies — resulting in an increase in costs. In other words, people with pre-existing health conditions such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and rare diseases, will be paying much more than anyone else — an outcome that most Americans do not want. The bottom line is that the result of these regulations will be exactly the opposite of the stated goal: rather than making healthcare more affordable, this would make health care much less affordable for the people who need it most.” […]

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