Analysis of a Proposal to Offer a Public Plan Through the New Health Insurance Exchanges

Posted on
July 22, 2010

This morning CBO released a letter to Chairman Fortney Pete Stark analyzing a proposal to add a “public plan” to the options available through the health insurance exchanges that will be established under the recently enacted health care legislation—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA (Public Law 111-148).
 
Under the proposal, the Department of Health and Human Services would establish and administer a public health insurance plan and would charge premiums to fully cover its costs for benefit payments and administrative expenses. The plan’s payment rates for physicians and other practitioners would be based on Medicare’s current rates but would not be subject to the future reductions required by Medicare’s sustainable growth rate formula; instead, those rates would initially increase by 5 percent and then would rise annually to reflect estimated increases in physicians’ costs. The plan would pay hospitals and other providers the same amounts that would be paid under Medicare, on average, and would establish payment rates for prescription drugs through negotiation. Health care providers would not be required to participate in the public plan in order to participate in Medicare.

CBO estimates that the public plan’s premiums would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges. The differences between the premiums of the public plan and the average premiums of private plans would vary across the country because of geographic differences in the plans’ relative costs. Those differences in premiums would reflect the net impact of differences in the factors that affect all health insurance premiums, including the rates paid to providers, administrative costs, the degree of benefit management applied to control spending, and the characteristics of the enrollees.

CBO estimates that roughly one-third of the people obtaining coverage through the insurance exchanges would enroll in the public plan. We anticipate that, under the proposal, about 25 million people would purchase coverage individually through the exchanges on average during the 2017–19 period; in addition, about 13 million people would obtain employment-based coverage through the exchanges—so total enrollment in exchange plans would be about 38 million. Total enrollment in the public plan would thus be roughly 13 million. Given all of the factors at work, however, those estimates are subject to an unusually high degree of uncertainty. 
 
CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that the proposal would reduce federal budget deficits through 2019 by about $53 billion. That estimate includes a $37 billion reduction in exchange subsidies and a $27 billion increase in tax revenues that would result because a greater share of employees’ compensation would take the form of taxable wages and salaries (rather than nontaxable health benefits). Those changes would be partly offset by an $11 billion increase in costs for providing tax credits to small employers. (The proposal would have minimal effects on other outlays and revenues related to the insurance coverage provisions of PPACA.)

The bulk of those budgetary effects would occur in the second half of the decade; the savings estimated for 2019 are about $14 billion. Although CBO and JCT have not yet extended to 2020 the models they use to estimate insurance coverage, the proposal would probably reduce the federal budget deficit by about $15 billion in that year, bringing the total budgetary savings through 2020 to about $68 billion. As discussed in CBO’s letter, those estimates are smaller than figures that have been previously reported regarding the savings from establishing a similar public plan because those previous estimates were related to legislation that differed in a number of ways from what was enacted.