The July 13 Wall Street Journal editorial updates yesterday's ray of hope.
One remaining debate is over Ted Cruz’s “freedom option.” The Texas Senator’s amendment says that any insurer that offers at least one ObamaCare-compliant plan could also sell other types of coverage off the exchanges. The expectation is that a more competitive and dynamic insurance market will emerge outside of ObamaCare. Released from federal mandates and price controls, insurers could offer many more innovative products designed for individuals, rather than standardized coverage planned in Washington.
Mr. Cruz acknowledges that insurance markets could “segment,” meaning that younger and healthier people would gravitate to the Cruz option, where premiums are likely to be much cheaper. Older people with more health expenses would remain on ObamaCare, which bars insurers from charging higher premiums based on health risks and bans exclusions for pre-existing conditions.
The logic of the Cruz proposal is that there is a rough consensus among Republicans that government should guarantee access to coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. In that case, government should pay for this guarantee, in the form of a de facto high-risk insurance pool, rather than hiding the cost in cross-subsidies imposed on private citizens.
The virtue of this approach is transparency and honesty. In a bifurcated market, premiums would be much higher for ObamaCare plans. But they’d be offset for consumers by much higher federal subsidies that rise with premiums...So, the solution envisioned yesterday could actually emerge. The exchanges become what they already are -- places to get subsidies. Where you go to sign up for medicare, income-based premium subsidies, and so on. [The "rough consensus" really is not all that much about preexisting conditions. It is about subsidies based on income and age.] The rest of the market can be free.
It's not perfect. If we "bifurcate," just why should insurance companies have to offer an exchange policy? You can smell a cross subsidy from off exchange to on-exchange already, together with restrictions on competition to enforce that cross subsidy.
Will the off exchange policies offer guaranteed renewability, portability from state to state, and portability into and out of employment? Not yet, I think, but that's where they need to go.
The WSJ emphasizes preexisting conditions, but let's make a distinction between people with preexisting conditions right now, the day after Obamacare destroyed the individual market, and people who get conditions next year that become preexisting the year after that.
If the point of exchanges is to be high risk pools forever, for anyone who in the future develops a preexisting condition as the WSJ seems to envision, then Sen. Cruz free market idea will be very weak. It will offer people one year worth of cheap insurance, and then the minute anyone gets actually sick they transition to subsidized insurance.
The combination of free market and exchange has to be designed to keep people out of the exchanges. The previous limits on signing up for people who, starting a year from now, do not have continuous coverage, go a step in that direction. You want people to buy health insurance not so much for this year's expenses, but for the right to be covered next year if they develop a preexisting condition, and then to stay with their individual policies.
Yes, people who have preexisting conditions now cannot jump in to the market, because the market doesn't exist. But that does not mean that subsidized exchanges should forever be an absorbing state for anyone who gets sick or old. Which is all of us.
Still, the outlines of subsidies for those who need them, and freedom for the rest of us, seems to be on the table.
Update:
Or maybe not. Mike Cannon writes there will be price controls on the "free" market alternative, linking them to exchange policies. Together with a requirement to offer exchange policies, this looks just like a small broadening of exchange policies, cross subsidies intact. Since the exchange policies are specific to counties, I can't see how this is portable across even county lines, let alone state lines, guaranteed renewable, and so forth.
