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Testimony of Sabrina Corlette, J.D. earlier than the U.S. Home of Representatives Training & Workforce Well being Subcommittee, April 26, 2023
Good morning Chairman Good, Rating Member DeSaulnier. My identify is Sabrina Corlette and I’m a Analysis Professor at Georgetown College’s McCourt College of Public Coverage.
It’s an honor for me to be a part of this dialogue of insurance policies to assist cut back well being care prices for working folks and their households.
Lately Congress has made a number of makes an attempt to enhance well being care entry, affordability, and high quality. None has had a better affect than the Affected person Safety and Reasonably priced Care Act (ACA).
Immediately, People with ESI take without any consideration most of the protections they take pleasure in beneath the ACA, together with protections for folks with pre-existing situations, protection for younger adults, cost-free preventive companies, and caps on our annual out-of-pocket prices.
Extra just lately, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (CAA) now protects 177 million shoppers from sudden medical payments and helps empower employers to be more practical purchasers of well being advantages.
And final 12 months, the Inflation Discount Act (IRA) has helped advance the protection and affordability positive aspects beneath the ACA and is reducing prescription drug prices for Medicare enrollees.
Nonetheless, challenges stay. Since 1999, worker contributions to premiums have elevated by about 300%, and the common deductible for a single employee has risen from $303 in 2006 to $1,562 in 2022.
The first motive for the affordability challenges in ESI is rising well being care costs. On common, business insurers are paying twice the quantity that Medicare pays for a similar service.
There are a variety of causes for this. First, consolidation within the well being care sector is granting suppliers with outsized market energy to demand increased reimbursement charges.
Second, a scarcity of value transparency has left many employers at the hours of darkness about what’s driving price development.
Third, most of the third-party distributors that employers use to form and administer their well being plans have monetary incentives to maintain well being care prices excessive.
Employers can not remedy the affordability disaster in well being care alone – they want help from policymakers.
Sadly, three of the 4 ideas into account at present don’t deal with the associated fee drivers in our system. They merely shift the burden of price development to employers with older, much less wholesome workforces.
First, Affiliation Well being Plans: The first means AHPs can provide low premium charges is thru the exemption from ACA score rules. This allows them to cherry choose wholesome employer teams out of the ACA-regulated market. AHPs simply create new winners and losers, with the losers being those that are older and sicker.
Second, the “Self-insurance Safety Act”: The proposal would additional encourage the proliferation of level-funded plans within the small-group market, posing two main dangers. First, many small employers could also be uncovered to sudden monetary legal responsibility once they self-fund their plan.
Second, if small employers with youthful, more healthy staff shift to level-funded merchandise in important numbers, it would depart employers with older, sicker employees behind. This causes opposed choice, the place premium charges rise for employers whose teams can not move the stop-loss issuers’ underwriting.
Simply as with AHPs, this laws does nothing to deal with the underlying motive why there’s an affordability disaster for ESI: the costs that business insurers pay for supplier companies and prescribed drugs.
Third, the “Telehealth Profit Growth for Employees Act”:
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing in federal legislation that forestalls employer group well being plans from overlaying telehealth companies. Certainly, 96% of huge companies already achieve this.
Employers are struggling to afford the rising price of medical health insurance – that is indeniable. However encouraging the proliferation of stripped-down telehealth advantages that discourage care coordination, don’t cowl staple items like hospitalization, prescribed drugs, and labs, and shouldn’t have to adjust to client protections or psychological well being parity, shouldn’t be the answer.
Lastly, I wish to thank the Subcommittee for making an attempt to roll again a hospital billing apply that’s driving up prices for employers and enrollees alike. The hospital facility proposal earlier than this subcommittee is a step in the correct path.
Thanks in your time, and I welcome your questions.
A webcast of the listening to and Ms. Corlette’s full written testimony can be found here.
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