While efforts are under way in Congress to repeal some or all of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, many of those initiatives could actually drive up insurance rates, harming the people the reform efforts are purporting to help.
In a speech today to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club, Michael Bertaut, a national health care policy expert and the health care economist and exchange coordinator for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, said repealing Obamacare would “only make things worse” with respect to the cost of health insurance.
“The confusion will be manifest in higher rates,” Bertaut said.
Several other measures under consideration would also have a negative effect, Bertaut said, including eliminating the individual mandate, which requires individuals to obtain and maintain health insurance; eliminating the employer mandate, which requires businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance to 95% of their workers; and installing a public option program, which would move more low-income individuals into a government pool that would reimburse providers at rates comparable to those paid by Medicaid and Medicare.
Removing the cost-sharing reduction provision of the ACA would also result in higher rates. The cost-sharing reduction in the federal health care law subsidizes co-pays and deductibles for elderly and low-income patients who have bought certain plans on the Health Insurance Marketplace.
Without those subsidies, providers will still have to provide care. They’ll just pass along the costs of those unmet co-pays and deductibles to other insured patients, Bertaut says.
On a related subject, Bertaut said he believes the state’s recent expansion of Medicaid is a positive development that will ultimately save the state money in the long run, since the federal government is picking up a greater portion of the tab for caring for low-income patients.
But the state will have to find a predictable source of matching dollars, which could be between $200 million and $300 million a year, he said.
“We have to figure out a way to balance the money coming in with the money going out and make this sustainable,” he said. “We want this to be sustainable.”
—Stephanie Riegel
