Health Insurance Crisis

California legislative health committees have approved legislation authored by their chairs that would require health plans and insurers to transition from medical underwriting to community-based rating in 2014.  The authors of the bills, AB 1461 and SB 961, said they would conform California law to a similar provision of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) that becomes effective that year.

The California Association of Health Plans (CAHP) opposes the bills unless they are amended to also mirror the PPACA’s requirement that all individuals be enrolled in a health plan or have health insurance.  If the PPACA’s so-called “individual mandate” is set aside as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court this year, CAHP fears without a similar requirement in California law, health plans will fall into the adverse selection death spiral and become actuarially unsustainable.

But putting teeth into any California requirement that all residents have some form of medical coverage could prove problematic since those teeth like the PPACA version would likely take the form of a penalty or excise tax.  As a new tax, it would require approval by two thirds of the California Legislature, which would be a near political impossibility as long as Republicans hold at least one third of the seats in either house.

CAHP also dislikes provisions in the bills that would bar health plans from considering smoking when setting an applicant’s rates, arguing it would lead to non-smokers subsidizing smokers.

If the U.S. Supreme Court severs a keystone element of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that mandates all Americans have public or private health coverage by 2014 but leaves intact another key provision requiring insurers and managed care plans to accept all applicants without medical underwriting, payers would experience adverse selection and premium rates would necessarily rise in response, making coverage less affordable.  That undermines a key objective of the 2010 law designed to reduce the number of people who are medically uninsured, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research concludes in a research note issued this month.

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.