21.3 million Americans with high (and likely unaffordable) deductibles and narrow access to doctors and drugs. The vast majority of whom are having their premiums paid, in whole or in part, by taxpayers. It’s worth pointing out that many of the new enrollees are likely people who did not enroll when the premium was 2-4% of their income but do when coverage is given to them for free. The data below does not yet have 2024 (breakdown by income has not been released yet), but I’d bet the trend holds.
Category: Affordable Care Act
Should Employers Fund Rare Disease Research and Therapies?
Included in Friday Links (November 10) was the title, “Would coverage for gene therapies make employer-based health insurance unaffordable?” That raises an important question: How much should employers (and employees) be required to pay for hyper-expensive therapies very few people need? A related question: should the purpose of employee health coverage be to recruit and retain workers or fund rare disease research and therapies?
Monday Links
- There are about 36 million Health Savings Accounts holding $104 billion.
- What the elites don’t understand about obesity.
- Built-in programming for your self-driving car: Should it risk injury to you to avoid hitting a pedestrian? Or the other way around? (WSJ)
- The case for kicking ineligible people off the Medicaid rolls. (DMN)
- It may not be the onset of Alzheimer’s: memory lapses are normal.
- The ACCESS Act would allow roughly 5 million lower-income individuals to redirect their cost sharing subsidy (which now goes to insurance companies) into Health Savings Accounts (which they would own and control). Dean Clancy comments.
CBO: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Not Very Innovative
The poorly named Affordable Care Act created the office of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). As Joe Albanese explains in National Review the new agency’s mission
…is to test new ways of paying for and delivering health-care services in federal health programs through pilot programs called “models.” These models are required by law to reduce costs and/or improve quality of care, which they pursue by enacting major policy changes.