Wednesday Links

Posted on by John C. Goodman

The new Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are formulated to a particular variant that is currently giving rise to only 3% of covid infections.

Paragon: “We estimate the ACA led to only 1.6 million more Americans with private health insurance despite $60 billion in annual subsidies — an … annual cost of roughly $36,800 for each additional private-insurance enrollee.”

Neanderthal DNA in modern humans has been linked to serious hand disease, the shape of people’s noses and various other human traits.

Study: People with positive beliefs around getting older lived seven and a half years longer than those who felt negatively about it. (NYT)

2 thoughts on “Wednesday Links”

  1. Thanks for posting the Paragon article on the Affordable Care Act mess.

    I was somewhat puzzled by the reforms that the authors suggest. They want individuals “to be able to purchase insurance without inflated premiums.”

    So do I, but the only way to get around inflated premiums is to allow medical underwriting again. Healthy people can then buy insurance that is affordable and “meets their needs.”

    This may not be a bad thing, but let’s air it out.

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  2. The Paragon article also referred to the ironical results of the CSR-funding refusal of the Trump administration.

    I think this will go down in history as one of the most bizarre public policy “events” in recent years. It was certainly a gruesome defeat for Republicans.

    No one outside the hard-core ACA chroniclers writes about this very much, but let me summarize it briefly.

    The Trump administration refused to pay for the Cost-sharing reduction benefit in ACA plans.
    The Trump team did not have any ideological complaint. Instead, they liked the idea that their action would cause ACA premiums to increase. This in turn would theoretically make ACA beneficiaries mad at the Democrats, and hasten the demise of the ACA.

    Well, because of the insidiously clever subsidy structure of the ACA, here is what actually happened.

    The premiums did go up for CSR recipients. But that caused subsidies to go up also. The insured was now getting a $300 subsidy instead of a $200 subsidy. They could take the subsidy and often buy a better quality plan on the exchange,

    This was called “silver loading,” A health care writer named Andrew Sprung described how it works in detail. I can walk anyone through it if they are interested.

    The upshot was that many ACA recipients were happy and grateful about what the federal government had done for them! (far from being mad, as the Trump team had hoped)

    I notice now that when Dr John Goodman or Sen Cassidy talks about reforming the ACA, they refer to a fixed-dollar credit. That is precisely– absolutely– the key feature that would wean the public away from the ACA. (assuming that is a worthwhile goal.)

    –

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