What’s Next for the ACA?: A Lecture by Larry Levitt

What’s Next for the ACA?: A Lecture by Larry Levitt
October 3, 2017 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 1010
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Join Larry Levitt for a talk about the future of the Affordable Care Act and health care in America.

Larry Levitt is Senior Vice President for Special Initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Senior Advisor to the President of the Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, he served as a Senior Health Policy Advisor to the White House and Department of Health and Human Services. He holds a bachelors degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a masters degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Center for Health Law Policy and Innovation, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and the Harvard Health Law Society, all at Harvard Law School.

ERISA and Graham-Cassidy: A Disaster in Waiting for Employee Health Benefits and for Dependents under 26 on their Parents’ Plans

Graham Cassidy § 105 would repeal the ACA “employer mandate”.  Although its sponsors claim that the bill will give states a great deal of flexibility, it will do nothing to help states ensure that employers provide their employees with decent health insurance; quite the reverse.  It will also give employers the freedom to ignore the popular ACA requirement that allows children up to age 26 to receive coverage through their parent’ plans, at least when their parents get health insurance from their employers.  Here’s why.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to foster and build on health insurance plans that employers in the US provide to their employees.  With limited exceptions such as provisions about wellness plans, it left in place the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), the federal statute that governs benefits that employers offer their employees.  Rather than amending ERISA to place new federal requirements on employer-provided plans, ACA imposed a tax penalty (called a “shared responsibility payment”) on employers (with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees) with employees who receive tax credits for purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges.  This is the ACA “employer mandate,” aimed to deter employers from dumping their existing health care plans.  It is the ACA provision that supported the mantra: “you’ll get to keep the insurance you have.” This mandate is imposed through a tax and otherwise leaves in place the regulatory vacuum created by ERISA.  Let me explain how.

ERISA, enacted in 1974, is the federal statute that governs employee “welfare” plans: benefits, including health benefits, that employers offer their employees.  Although ERISA imposes quite substantial requirements on pension plans, it imposes only disclosure and fiduciary responsibilities on welfare plans.  Employers must state clearly for their employees what they are given—but may also reserve the right to change plans, as long as they tell their employees that they might do this.  Employers also must manage their plans as a good fiduciary would, but this does not mean that employers must offer minimum benefits to their employees, or indeed any benefits at all. Read More

What’s Next for the ACA?: A Lecture by Larry Levitt

What’s Next for the ACA?: A Lecture by Larry Levitt
October 3, 2017 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 1010
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Join Larry Levitt for a talk about the future of the Affordable Care Act and health care in America.

Larry Levitt is Senior Vice President for Special Initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Senior Advisor to the President of the Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, he served as a Senior Health Policy Advisor to the White House and Department of Health and Human Services. He holds a bachelors degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a masters degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Center for Health Law Policy and Innovation, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and the Harvard Health Law Society, all at Harvard Law School.

New CBO Analysis: Cutting Subsidies Would Backfire on Trump

By Wendy Netter Epstein 

The cost-sharing reduction payments are an essential component of the ACA.  These payments reduce out-of-pocket costs for lower income enrollees so that individuals can actually use their insurance coverage and not be prevented from seeking care because of a high deductible or a copay they can’t afford.  President Trump has been threatening since he took office to end these payments.  And there is at least some possibility that he has the authority to do (see House v. Price).

Politically speaking, Trump’s goal in threatening to end these payments is either to hasten what he sees as the inevitable demise of Obamacare—or at least to use the threat of ending the payments to hold the feet to the fire of those who have resisted “repeal and replace.”  Either way, Democrats have widely condemned Trump’s threats and the instability they cause in the market. Read More

How to Destabilize Insurance Markets Without Really Trying

Cross-posted from the Take Care blog

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released the latest draft of his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As of last night, it appears that this version of the bill is dead, with four Senators declaring that they won’t vote to move it forward. But provisions of this bill are worth talking about, both for what they reveal about health insurance and for what they reveal about the process by which the Senate is considering ACA repeal.  The latest draft contains a number of new provisions, but two caught my eye: (1) Senator Ted Cruz’s attempt to bifurcate the individual insurance market and (2) a clause about membership in a health care sharing ministry as satisfying the requirement of “continuous creditable coverage.”

The Cruz amendment has received a large amount of coverage both in the popular press and by more specialized policy outlets. But there has been little attention to the clause about health care sharing ministries. Fortunately, I wrote a 5,000 word book chapter on the ministries as part of an academic conference in 2015 (here I am presenting on the topic, if you’re really interested). Read More

Will the Recent Workplace Wellness Bill Really Undermine Employee Health Privacy?

By Jessica L. Roberts

While the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has taken center stage, another health-related bill has been making its way through the House without nearly as much attention. On March 2, 2017, Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) introduced House Resolution (HR) 1313 on behalf of herself and Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI).   The bill would lift current legal restrictions on access to genetic and other health-related information. Specifically, HR 1313 targets provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that prohibit employers from conducting unnecessary medical examinations and inquiries that do not relate to job performance; the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act’s (GINA) provisions proscribing employers from requesting, requiring or purchasing the genetic information of their employees; and GINA’s prohibition on group health insurance plans acquiring genetic information for underwriting purposes and prior to enrollment. The bill passed through the Committee on Education and the Workforce last Wednesday along strict party lines with 22 Republicans supporting the proposed legislation and 17 Democrats opposing it.

Despite the public outcry against the bill, HR 1313 may not be as far-reaching as it initially appears. First, while advocates of genetic privacy fear the worst, both the ADA and GINA contain exceptions for wellness programs that already allow employers to access at least some employee health data. Second, even if HR 1313 passes, employees would still enjoy the ADA’s and GINA’s antidiscrimination protections.   HR 1313 could well give employers additional access to genetic and other health-related information about their employees but it is not a license to then use that information to discriminate.

Read More

Medicare Advantage Might Have Potential — If Companies Play Fair

By Shailin Thomas

Medicare Advantage was introduced as a mechanism for capturing some of the oft-extolled efficiencies of the private health insurance market. Instead of paying providers for services directly, as in traditional Medicare, the government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a predetermined, risk-adjusted amount of money per patient to cover all medical expenses for the year. The risk adjustment ensures that companies insuring Medicare Advantage patients with chronic diseases — who will likely need more intensive, expensive care — receive additional funds to help cover those costs. For each qualifying condition a patient has, the Medicare Advantage plan receives on average an additional $3000 annually.

While the risk adjustment of Medicare Advantage payments was well intentioned and economically rational, it appears to have opened up an avenue for significant abuse on the part of Medicare Advantage insurers. The Department of Justice recently joined a lawsuit against UnitedHealth, a large provider of Medicare Advantage plans, for allegedly defrauding the government out of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. The complaint alleges that UnitedHealth “upcoded” its risk-adjustment claims by submitting for conditions patients did not actually have and refusing to correct false claims when it discovered or should have discovered them. In essence, the company allegedly realized it could extract more money out of the government by making the patients it covers appear sicker than they actually are, and took full advantage of that.

Read More

What is the Meaning of Trump’s Day 1 Executive Order on the ACA?

Guest Post by Erin C. Fuse Brown

On the day of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order instructing the executive branch agencies to exercise their discretion and authority to  “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of” fees, taxes, or penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The order does not specify which “fiscal burdens” it targets, but the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the various industry and payroll taxes imposed by the law immediately jump to mind. These are all written into the law, and the President cannot unilaterally set them aside. The executive order says it is following the law, including the Administrative Procedure Act, which is good because it means the President is not instructing anyone to flout the law. Even existing ACA rules cannot be undone overnight and can only be changed or repealed through a lengthy notice-and-comment rulemaking process.

There is such a thing as “enforcement discretion,” which some suggest means that the individual mandate won’t be enforced anymore. I’m not so sure. If the President instructed the IRS to stop collecting taxes from billionaires under its enforcement discretion, that wouldn’t be legal. Read More

LIVE ONLINE TODAY @ NOON: President-Elect Trump’s Health Policy Agenda: Priorities, Strategies, and Predictions

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Webinar: President-Elect Trump’s Health Policy Agenda: Priorities, Strategies, and Predictions

Monday, December 19, 2016, 12:00 – 1:00pm

WATCH LIVE ONLINE!: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/events/details/president-elect-trumps-health-policy-agenda

Submit your questions to the panelists via Twitter @PetrieFlom.

Please join the Petrie-Flom Center for a live webinar to address what health care reform may look like under the new administration. Expert panelists will address the future of the Affordable Care Act under a “repeal and replace” strategy, alternative approaches to insurance coverage and access to care, the problem of high drug prices, innovation policy, support for scientific research, and other topics. The panel will discuss opportunities and obstacles relevant to President-elect Trump’s proposals, as well as hopes and concerns for health policy over the next four years. Webinar participants will have the opportunity to submit questions to the panelists for discussion.

Panelists

  • Joseph R. Antos, Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy, American Enterprise Institute
  • Lanhee J. Chen, David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Director of Domestic Policy Studies and Lecturer, Public Policy Program; affiliate, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
  • Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President, American Action Forum
  • Moderator:Gregory Curfman, Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Health Publications

Read More

Will Medicare Reform be a Republican Obamacare?

By Shailin Thomas

As the health care community waits with bated breath to see what will become of the Affordable Care Act under the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress have set their sites on another health-related initiative that has been on their wish list for years: reforming Medicare. While Trump promised throughout his campaign not to change the fundamental ways in which Medicare works — in part to appeal to older voters, who overwhelming would like the program to stay as it is — shortly after the election, “modernizing Medicare” appeared as a priority on the transition website for the new administration.

The reform many Republicans are pushing for — championed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) — is privatization along the lines of Medicare Advantage. Instead of providing for full insurance coverage through the government, as traditional Medicare currently does, Ryan’s proposal would have eligible patients purchase insurance from private companies with financial assistance from the government. The theory is that by having private insurers provide coverage, Medicare will capture efficiencies of the private market, while simultaneously offering consumers more choice in the coverage they receive.

After Paul Ryan first unveiled this plan in 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report detailing the significant fiscal problems with this “modernized” vision of Medicare. According to the Foundation’s analysis, the average out-of-pocket expense for beneficiaries increase from $5,630 under the current system to $12,500. The reason for this increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that providing coverage is actually more expensive for a private insurer than it is for the government.  The proposal faces other economic challenges as well, and ironically, some of them stem from its close resemblance to Obamacare.

Read More