Must Read: David Anderson: The Individual Market Under AHCA V2
Must Read: David Anderson: The Individual Market Under AHCA V2: “What [could] the individual insurance market could look like under the AHCA as rumored to be as of 0030, March 23, 2017[?]…
I want to speculate about how insurers would do their plan designs. The major policy planks that would influence plan design are the following:
- Guarantee issue at a universal price (community rating)
- No Essential Health Benefits
- No actuarial value requirements
- 5:1 premium rating
- Risk adjustment is either ineffective/easy to game or gone
- Fixed, age based subsidies
- No ability to transfer surplus subsidies to HSA
Smart insurers will bifurcate their product design. They can’t underwrite their way to a healthy risk pool so they will use benefit design to segment it instead.
The first stream of product design will be aimed to cover very little. The primary objective of these plans are to be priced at the subsidy point. They will be very narrow networks with no major academic medical centers involved; their benefits will be designed to drive away sick people with chronic conditions. For instance, asthma inhalers or insulin or Epi-Pens might not be covered. Hep-C drugs would not be covered. Maternity care would not be covered except after a $15,000 stand-alone deductible. They will use donut benefit designed principles where the first couple of PCP visits are no cost sharing but everything else comes with $300 co-pays and $20,000 deductibles. Utilization is designed to be very low and the population that will choose these policies will have to be very healthy.
The selling point for this plan is that it is free out of pocket after the subsidy AND it is sufficient to not incur the continuous coverage 30% premium penalty.
For the 50% of the population that drives 3% of the spend, this will be sufficient for most people as long as they don’t get hit by a bus nor come down with cancer during the policy year.
The other path of coverage is a full service insurance for the sick. It is a privatized and non-inclusive high cost risk pool. It will offer a network with top tier hospitals, it will cover chemotherapy. It will cover the cost of chronic disease management. It will look a lot like the insurance people get from their jobs. It will be massively out of reach for most people with chronic conditions as the subsidies will be grossly inadequate and the cost of care for some conditions are more than half the median income of an American family. But “access” to a good policy will be there.
There are a lot of moving parts so this is purely speculation but if I was working for an insurer, that is the strategic choice that is clear given the rules of the AHCA.