Since most working age Americans have employer-paid coverage, the Clinton administration’s reforms would have required all employers to cover their employees so that none had to obtain their own coverage in the individual market or be medically uninsured.  Rather than the Clinton administration’s employer mandate, the Obama administration instead placed the mandate on individuals, requiring all Americans to have medical coverage by 2014.  Key to the individual mandate in the PPACA is the law’s state health benefit exchanges to provide an insurance marketplace for small employers and individuals.

If the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the individual mandate later this year, it could mesh well what some observers believe is a trend toward more temporary and self-employment.  This trend has seen a significant boost in recent years as employers hire fewer people to do the same work or adopt processes that require fewer permanent staff.  This in turn has led to growing numbers of temporary and self-employed people.

Since these workers aren’t covered by employer-provided plans and must obtain health coverage on their own, they will benefit from the exchanges where participating insurers will be required to offer coverage with minimum coverages and premiums determined using modified community-based rating versus medical underwriting.  As 2014 draws closer, the exchanges could in turn encourage more to deliberately choose temporary and self-employment.  Many who might otherwise work for themselves balk at the prospect of having to find health coverage in the existing individual market where they can be declined for pre-existing medical conditions and don’t benefit from group purchasing power the exchanges would provide.  The exchanges and the PPACA’s mandates that all individuals have coverage and health plans and insurers accept all applicants regardless of medical history would significantly mitigate this disincentive for those considering self-employment.

The report has implications for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is predicated on all Americans being in a public or private managed care or health insurance plan by 2014 — with the bulk of private coverage employment-based.  The experience of California (and certainly other states) in the two years leading up to the enactment of the Act in 2010 shows that employer-based coverage — which had been eroding even prior to the recession with fewer small employers providing coverage — remains quite vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy that disrupt employment.

“We believe this investment on behalf of our customers is crucial to address the unsustainable increases in health-care costs that are making health insurance less affordable for our customers and the community,” explained Highmark spokesman Michael Weinstein.

While not mentioned in the story, another likely driver of this payer-provider consolidation is to ease the establishment of an accountable care organization (ACO) among the involved entities.

The note determined this scenario would result in only a small reduction in the number of medically uninsured Californians by 610,000 or 13 percent of the eligible uninsured by 2019. Eliminating the minimum coverage requirement while leaving in place the PPACA’s modified community-based rating where coverage is guaranteed to all applicants would not allow payers to avoid covering less healthy individuals more likely to need expensive medical care.

The UCLA research note effectively concurs with an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case filed by health insurers and plans who contend the PPACA’s coverage mandate is designed to work in conjunction with community-based versus individual medical underwriting and therefore cannot be excised from the law.  “The result would be a ‘marketwide adverse-selection death spiral’ that would thwart rather than advance Congress’s goal of expanding affordable health care,” they warn.

Political uncertainty related to the pending U.S Supreme Court decision this year on the constitutionality of a keystone component of the PPACA — the requirement that all Americans be covered by or purchase some form of health insurance including from state benefit exchanges  — has some states sitting on the sidelines.  Other states are operating on the assumption the PPACA is good law until the Supreme Court rules otherwise and are attending to the complexities of getting their exchanges ready for business come January 2014.

Click here for the Kaiser Family Foundation report.