Cruz plan gets thumbs up from HHS but thumbs down from most everyone else

Jul 19 2017

Contradicting the opinion of most policy experts, a draft report from the Trump administration forecasts better enrollment and lower premiums for everyone who buys their own health insurance if a controversial amendment proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas were to become law.

The draft surfaced just as Republican senators were lunching with President Donald Trump on Wednesday to talk about the next steps in the health care debate.

“The Republicans never discuss how good their healthcare bill is, & it will get even better at lunchtime,” tweeted Trump, before the group convened.

But findings from the draft report drew immediate criticism from health policy experts as opaque and misleading.

"The details get a bit dicey," said Craig Garthwaite, director of the health care program at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "No one I've talked to thinks [the analysis] is well done."

The forecasts in a draft analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services are exactly opposite from what many experts forecast.

Still, the HHS analysis did provide some insight into how HHS envisioned that the Cruz plan, part of the Senate bill that appeared to die this week, could have worked. Particularly notable: The analysis assumes annual deductibles of $12,000, which means consumers would have to pay that amount — which is far higher than allowed under the ACA — before most benefits are covered.

On Wednesday, health care developments continued to unfold at a breakneck pace, and with a zigzagging trajectory, when the Senate Budget Committee posted on its website yet another bill. This one is an updated version of the 2015 "repeal and delay" bill, which is likely the measure the Senate will consider next week if a vote to start debate succeeds.

It would repeal all of the taxes that paid for the Affordable Care Act's benefits, roll back the expansion of Medicaid (but not cap the underlying program), nullify the requirement for most people to have insurance and rescind the financial aid for low- and moderate-income Americans.

Late in the afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office released an updated estimate of an earlier analysis concluding that the new "repeal and delay" measure could result in 32 million fewer Americans having coverage and premiums doubling by 2026. By 2020, according to CBO, "about half the nation's population would live in areas having no insurer participating in the non-group market." The new bill does not include the Cruz amendment, the subject of the HHS report.

Opposition to the Cruz amendment from powerful health care sectors, like the insurance industry, is cited as one reason why the Senate was unable to muster enough votes to move the whole Senate bill forward for debate this week.

Last Friday, the insurance industry trade lobby sent a harsh warning to Congress, saying the Cruz amendment "is simply unworkable in any form and would undermine protections for those with pre-existing medical conditions, increase premiums and lead to widespread terminations of coverage."

Today, the HHS report took a very different view.

First reported in the right-leaning Washington Examiner, it forecasts far more people covered by insurance in 2024 if the Cruz plan were adopted, as compared with how many would be insured under the Affordable Care Act.

It also projects premiums would fall, both in plans that meet all the rules of the ACA, and in plans Cruz proposes, which would not have to follow the rules. The Cruz plans would have lower premiums, however, because they could come with far fewer benefits — and could reject people with medical problems or charge them more.

Insurers and actuaries said the Cruz proposal would result in a segmented market, with younger and healthier people drawn to the skimpier, less expensive plans. That, in turn, would leave older or sicker enrollees in the ACA-compliant plans, causing their premiums to spiral upward.

But the analysis by HHS shows premium costs for ACA-compliant plans would go down by more than $250 a month in 2024 when compared with what they would be under current law. The Cruz plans would be super cheap, at under $200 a month under the rosiest scenario outlined.

Experts today immediately pounced on the department’s methods — in as much as they could be determined, since the full report was not released.

(HHS did not respond to requests for comment or for the release of the full report.)

For starters, the draft report, they say, compares premiums for a 40-year-old with the "weighted average" of all people of all ages purchasing ACA plans now.

"It's not apples to apples," said Matt Fiedler, a fellow at the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Innovation in Health Policy.

It cited its own "proprietary model" used to determine how many people would switch from ACA plans to the new Cruz plans, without spelling out its assumptions. Not including such details is highly unusual and makes the results difficult to analyze, said Garthwaite, adding: "There's nothing in this that gives me any hope that the entire report will be any more accurate, complete or unbiased."

Meanwhile, over lunch at the White House, President Trump asked senators to skip all or part of their August recess in order to work on another proposal to repeal and replace the ACA. He promised premiums that would be significantly lower, without citing details on how that would occur.