Uninsured Rate Has Fallen, But May Soon Increase

While there are plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical about the Affordable Care Act, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s hard to argue that imposing an individual mandate to purchase insurance won’t result in more people obtaining coverage. According to the results of a recent survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that’s precisely what’s happened. Based on results of the National Health Interview Survey, researchers at the CDC estimate that nearly 4 million people gained insurance coverage from January to March of 2014. Of course, we also know that people tend to procrastinate, and that consequently, there was a surge of last-minute sign-ups occurring in March. Those newly insured individuals aren’t accounted for in the CDC’s findings, and other estimates that include those individuals put the number of newly insured at between 8 and 10 million. Even then, as Jonathan Gruber is quoted saying in the New York Times, “This is really a three-year process of implementation….Trying to draw strong conclusions from one quarter of one year is impossible.” The bottom line is: The early indications are that more people have coverage, and things seem to be moving in the right direction. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

According to another report, though, the end of the third quarter may bring a slight uptick to the number of uninsured. Apparently, Uncle Sam has actually been checking on the information people submitted through Healthcare.gov when they signed up for coverage. As it turns out, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found that nearly 1 million people had issues documenting their status as U.S. citizens. Most of these people were citizens, complied with requests to submit proper documentation, and have kept their coverage. But there are still 115,000 people who have failed to submit documentation by the government’s September 5th deadline. As I’m writing this, these people have two weeks to get their documentation in order. If they do not do so by September 30th, they will lose their coverage. On top of this, more than 350,000 other people–who are unquestionably U.S. citizens–may lose their federal subsidies that lowered the cost of their insurance, because they didn’t submit verifiable proof of income to the government. Together, this represents nearly one-half million people that could be at risk of going without insurance once again after only part of a year.

The issue is whether the discrepancies in documentation are accurate reflections of reality. If someone is an undocumented immigrant, the law is clear that they are not entitled to purchase health insurance through the exchange. Likewise, if someone makes more money than they claim, the law is clear that they are only entitled to the amount of subsidy that corresponds to their actual income. So, if the failure to provide verifiable documentation is legitimate, then by denying these individuals coverage, or eliminating their subsidy, the government is simply correcting a mistake it should not have made to begin with. That is, these people should never have qualified for coverage or a subsidy. However, we know all too well the technical issues that Healthcare.gov has experienced, and many people are claiming that they have tried to upload their documentation electronically without success. If the fault lies with a federal website that continues to experience glitches, it isn’t appropriate to deny people who are lawful residents of the U.S. and/or who have accurately reported their income to be denied coverage. Which is the case? I can only speculate, but I’d be willing to bet it’s a mixture of both. What I do know is that this is one more wrinkle in a complicated implementation process. But, to paraphrase Dr. Gruber, we’ve got at least two more years to iron things out.

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Health IT Thrives With New Startup Companies

As the health insurance exchanges opened for enrollment just days ago, the federal government, including the President and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), had to acknowledge that it was not technologically ready. The IT infrastructures by which individuals tried to sign up for health insurance crashed and were unavailable throughout the first day and the weeks after. Those same sights were supposed to track enrollment, but proved to not be as well tested and far more expensive than originally anticipated. However, despite the shortages and disappointments with government IT readiness for exchange websites, there was a surge in US-based startup companies that demonstrated just how innovative and forward thinking technology can be in the health care arena. Nine new companies, all curated through BluePrint Health were introduced at that same time three weeks ago on “Demo Day,” and were ready to show the new frontier of health care, and how to transform care delivery through technology.

Health IT Incubators Driving Innovation

Blueprint Health is an accelerator program geared towards health care companies that want an intensive three-month mentorship to help find customers and capital, and learn from leading industry experts. The companies that are selected for the program range from individuals with a clever value proposition to well-established organization leaders that have existing customers, investors and are generating significant revenue, but with new ideas. According to Doug Hayes, a Principal at BluePrint Health, “We are seeing an acute need for innovation at the seed stage of the health care ecosystem. With top-down changes in regulations and quickly shifting incentive structures, the most successful companies will be those who can nimbly adapt.”

He asserts that what makes BluePrint successful is that it is, “uniquely positioned to attract, identify, and support the entrepreneurs that fill the gaps of service left in the wake of massive industry changes.” The accelerator program promotes the mindset that new businesses should not have to focus exclusively on fundraising. Hayes says, “Building a company is extremely difficult, and a founders’ time is best spent on customer and product development, not fundraising.” With that mentality, BluePrint does not use many pre-established filters when evaluating the near 1,000 applications it receives each year, but instead concentrates on business models.

The nine particular startup companies that were cultivated during the summer of 2013 range from Healthify, which focuses on creating platforms that connect and standardize medical homes to treat social needs to Board Vitals, an organization that improves the testing system of our nation’s providers. Each of these new businesses gives hope to innovators and entrepreneurs.

The Companies

Artemis

Artemis is a health care analytics firm specializing in benefit claims. With employers spending billions of dollars on health care, benefits managers need more information than the historical, once a year paper reports of the past. With the Artemis platform, benefit managers have graphical, real-time updates for claims and assessments. The creators claim that that deploying its tactics not only saves money for organizations, but also heads off future costs through prevention and determination of key cost drivers.

Board Vitals

Board Vitals brings together publishers, universities, and top physicians into a single digital platform for medical specialty education, with pass rates that are 10% higher than the national average. According to co-founder, Dan Lambert, “Content is continually voted up and down, meaning that the very best material comes to the top and outdated or incorrect content is voted out.” His partner, Andrea Paul added that their aggressive, but attainable, goal is to have materials for 20 of the 35 specialties in 2014.

CredSimple

The founders of CredSimple created a system to make the mandatory credentialing of physicians cheaper and more efficient. According to co-founder Garry Choy, at present, credentialing takes two to three months per physician and hospitals spend millions a year on the routine, but inefficient process. CredSimple uses an impressive 214 data sources to verify credentials, saving all provider parties time and resources, with downstream positive implications for entire hospital systems.

Genterpret

Pharmaceutical companies strive to gain pricing power and market share using genetic information about how patients respond to drugs. Genterpret, started by two system biology PhDs, links genetics to drug responses in one-third of the time (six months) of previous genetic testers. The faster turn-around time and vast outreach program created by the founders suggests that the Genterpret technology can soon be applied to thousands of diseases, improving health outcomes and saving money.

Healthify

After years of working in Baltimore health clinics, the creators of Healthify joined forces to start a company that addresses social needs such as food insecurities to improve health in communities. Medicaid spending on medical homes averages about $15 billion, much of which is spent on social needs. The data collected by Healthify will become vital as medical homes and accountable care organizations begin to address social needs as integral to overall health and well being.

ReferBright

ReferBright helps health practitioners with digital marketing in a world full of medical advertisements. The goal, according to the founders, is to improve outreach and referral rates for various kinds of professionals. Additionally, the automated system makes updating personal information easy for practitioners and makes vetting of practitioners easy for hospitals, knowing the information on ReferBright has been inspected and verified.

SpotMe Fit

According to co-founder, Jarrod Wolf, SpotMe, “allows employers to reward their employees for attending any fitness facility, running in races, or for using fitness apps and devices. When the barrier to incentives are removed–like eliminating paperwork and providing immediate rewards–and employees are given the flexibility to choose how they engage in fitness, then program participation rates skyrocket.” This focus on wellness and fitness programs is to improve health outcomes and lower health costs through incentives, monetary and physical.

Staff Insight

The premise of Staff Insight is to increase workforce productivity, specifically through hospital leadership being able to understand and staff facilities to the optimal levels. The company aims to use real-time dashboard to identify staffing levels in units, test baseline productivity, set new benchmarks for productivity and ultimately save revenue for facilities by optimizing productivity. The founders claim that early adopters have already seen a two to four percent increase in productivity.

WellTrackOne

WellTrackOne conducts a Medicare-approved personal assessment that hospitals can use to track patient data and identify potential risk factors. To lessen the administrative burden and disruption to the workflow, WellTrackOne claims that it can integrate all electronic health records, from multiple systems to improve data and health outcomes.

The Future Of Health Technology

Despite the federal governments success in getting support from professional athletic organizations and celebrities like Jennifer Hudson, the technological infrastructure just wasn’t ready for consumer usage. In contrast, Doug Hayes says that a key reason BluePrint startups were ready on Demo Day is due to the mentor community and outreach.

He claims that a by-product of their focus on business models and portfolio is that it, “includes many enterprise solutions. The long sales cycle and disparate channels within health care makes enterprise sales an especially tough nut to crack. However, our experience within enterprise and our mentor community, 150 strong, makes us especially well positioned to help founders sell into large payers, provider networks, pharma, and other enterprise customers.

 

Mental Health Loses Funding As Government Continues Shutdown

In the months leading up to World Mental Health Day, DC has been shaken by a series of violent events that ended with innocent lives lost and our country’s mental health services called into question. During this same time period, Washington, DC has been consumed by a government shutdown, with lawmakers and policymakers trying to determine how to rein in our country’s financial burdens and overspending. Unfortunately, as federal and state governments look to cut budgets at every turn, mental and behavioral health services are often on the chopping block first. Financial cuts, compounded with US stigma often applied to mental health troubles and disparate access to services across the county, mean that those who need services most are often those left without proper care.

August though October brought DC into the spotlight for many reasons, the saddest of which is the violence that was covered by mass media as two shootings occurred. In one case, Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old, perpetrated a mass shooting that left 12 people dead, in Washington’s Navy Yard. Previous to the shooting, it was reported that Mr. Alexis was treated at the VA for mental health issues including sleep disorders and paranoia, but had not lost clearance.

Miriam Carey, also 34, reportedly had an unhealthy obsession with the White House when she drove her car into the White House gates and led police on a chase around DC before being killed. Although she had no reported psychosis or supposed violent intent, it was noted in the months leading up to the incident she believed that the President had beenstalking her and might have suffered from postpartum depression. When killed by authorities on Pennsylvania Avenue, she had her 18-month-old child in the car.

Budget Cuts

Although societal stigma and knowledge of where to access behavioral and mental services are often barriers to care, budget cuts continue to make seeking care more difficult. Whether this be through decreases in available services, lack of providers due to poor reimbursements or less preventative actions in communities, the impact of mental health funding shortages is great. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “increasingly, emergency rooms, homeless shelters and jails are struggling with the effects of people falling through the cracks due to lack of needed mental health services and supports.”

In the last five years, significant budget cuts have befallen mental health programs and services. From 2009 to 2011, states cut mental health budgets by a combined $4 billion- the largest single combined reduction to mental health spending since de-institutionalization in the 1970s. In Chicago alone, state budget cuts combined with reductions in county and city mental health services led to shutting six of the city’s 12 mental health clinics. These closures, along with other public and private center closures in Chicago, have eliminated vitally needed services, especially on the south and west sides where they are indispensable.

Threats of sequestration in 2013 had a significant impact on people’s ability to access mental health services and programs, including children’s mental health services, suicide prevention programs, homeless outreach programs, substance abuse treatment programs, housing and employment assistance, health research, and virtually every type of public mental health support. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration(SAMHSA) claimed it alone would be cutting $168 million from its 2013 spending, including areduction of $83.1 million in grants for substance abuse treatment programs.

Consequences

Despite the need to balance budget and make all health care services more efficient, many argue that society has better long-term outcomes if more federal and state dollars are allocated to mental and behavioral health care. This includes preventative services as well as mental health testing and treatment.

Because individuals with untreated mental illness often find themselves in emergency rooms, homeless shelters and prisons, the societal cost of prevention and treatment may be exponentially less than funding those other outlets and catchment areas. This is especially true in the case of children, who face cycling in and out of the system throughout their lives if left untreated.

These costs can be exceptionally large over the lifetime given that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that two-thirds of children with lifetime mental health problems never receive treatment. This takes substantial emotional and financial tolls on individuals and families, as well as the broader society. However, programs that address the mental health needs and provide services for youth show better outcomes in health and education that carry over the lifetime. For example, in the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, therapy is being used to curb youth violence, especially amongst those with behavioral and mental health care needs.

Additionally staining on the mental health care system is that during times of recession and budget cuts the caseload for mental health actually increases. It has been estimated that during this most recent recession, the caseload of community mental health services alone has increased almost 50 percent. This increase has most notably been seen in the Native American community, where suicide prevention is an essential part of the cultural health care demands.

Everyone Benefits

The NIMH contends that one in 17 people suffer from a “seriously debilitating mental illness,” we as a society are accountable for ensuring that those in need have resources for care. Not only does access to quality mental and behavioral health care ensure that individuals are being properly treated, but that America as a whole saves money and resources caring for those in need in other, more expensive settings. It may further prevent violent acts like those in DC from happing.

On this World Mental Health day think about the ways in which access to and support of mental and behavioral health care can be improved in your community.

 

President Obama Fails To Explain Tech Glitches And Solutions In ACA Speech

Monday at 11:30am EST, President Obama spoke in the Rose Garden about the recent troubles with health insurance exchange enrollment and websites. With a team of young people standing behind him and Janice Baker at his side, the first person in the state of Delaware to successfully enroll in the exchange, President Obama said he was speaking to every American wanting to get affordable health insurance. He claimed that in the last three weeks, despite the horrific technological problems with the websites, that “half a million consumers across the country have submitted application through federal and state marketplaces.” He further touted that the “federal site alone has been visited 20,000,000 times” in the last three weeks. Unfortunately for those American’s who are really interested in signing up on the exchange sites, he glossed over the depth and breadth of the current troubles, giving a speech that sounded more like a State of the Union address with small-business examples and reading letters written to the White House.

President Obama also alleged that no one wants to see the exchange sites improve more than the federal government, noting that, “the website has been to slow, and people have been getting stuck during the process.” He also said that it is the mission of the administration to make them “more better,” with visible cringing from the audience, but claimed failures were due to response rates. He said the public response was “overwhelming, which has aggravated the underlying problems.”

However, he failed to go any further to explain what those other underlying problems were or when specifically they will be fixed. He did say that while HHS and contractors such as CGI Federal are working out the “kinks,” American’s should be patient. He claimed that “if the product is good, [American people] are willing to be patient,” suggesting that there will not be a delay for the individual mandate.

Nevertheless, he followed this by assuring the public that unlike Black Friday sales, the insurance plans will not run out like purchasing a new PlayStation – adding to the list of items the administration has compared exchange sites to, including iPhones and travel websites.

Despite his promises of improvements and putting the “best and brightest” on the job, CNN and other sites have insisted that the inherent technological and platform problems with Healthcare.gov will not be resolved anytime soon. This begs the question, that if the federal government is now searching for the best and brightest to correct the estimated 5,000-5,000,000+ lines of coding that need to be fixed on the federal site alone, who was working on the original platforms?

As he continued his speech, the President reminded the American public that although the websites for enrollment are not as, “quick, consistent or efficient as we want,” that the exchange sites are far more than “just a website.” He noted that many pieces of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are already in place and being utilized by millions of Americans. He addressed pre-existing conditions, youth under the age of 26 and several other provisions that are already being rolled out by federal law, and the successes they have seen there.

He noted more examples of ACA triumph in Oregon, where he maintained that the exchange, “has cut the number of uninsured people by 10% in three week,” which is about “56,000 more Americans” with health insurance coverage.

During the speech, President Obama also tried to clarify the exchanges or marketplaces by describing them to the public as becoming part of a “big group plan… that bargains on your behalf for the best deal in health care.” He said that by doing so, insurance companies have created new products and options that strengthen market forces, leading to better deals.

He went on to say that without a doubt, “prices have come down,” further claiming that “when you add the next tax credits (those not yet implemented)… then the prices come down even further.”

The President rounded out his talk by noting the Republican party’s opposition to the ACA and how willing they were to “shut down the global economy” to fight against the ACA. A move, he claimed, that shows just how unwilling Republicans are to negotiate on legislation intended to, “free families from the pervasive fear that one illness one injury will cost you everything.”

While that may be the goal of the Affordable Care Act, the underlying technological and coding problems may prove to make that impossible.

 

Closing Racial And Ethnic Disparity Gaps: Implications Of The Affordable Care Act

For all intents and purposes, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the President’s signature piece of legislation, will provide more health care coverage to poor and underserved populations. Persistently disadvantaged communities have much further to go than those with insurance, and new means of accessing and paying for care will benefit them disproportionately. Nevertheless, with more than 20 percent of the nation’s Black population uninsured, more than 30 percent of Hispanics uninsured and a country still grappling with understanding and properly addressing disparities, just how far does the ACA take us?

By mandating individual health insurance coverage and expanding the list of covered preventative services, ACA legislation should, theoretically, improve the quality of health care for those populations at disproportionate risk of being uninsured and having low incomes. In advance of the January 2014 start of major health reform initiatives, some estimate that more than half of the uninsured will gain insurance coverage.

However, research has shown that having health insurance itself does not have a substantial impact if people cannot find a doctor to see them, do not have proper information about accessing resources, or are not treated in a culturally and environmentally competent manner. Moreover, when the number of uninsured could be decreased by more than half, but being uninsured is not equitable across racial and ethnic groups in the US, what happens to our countries most vulnerable?

It has been well documented that low-income individuals and those without employee-sponsored insurance (ESI) are more likely to be people of color. Kaiser and US Census estimates indicate that there are significant differences in insurance rates by race and ethnicity, with national averages approximating there are almost three times as many uninsured Hispanics as Whites. In Louisiana, for example, it is believed that more than 50% of the state’s Hispanics are uninsured, while only 18% of Whites are. In the same state, it is estimated that 30% of Blacks are uninsured, reiterating just how unbalanced our country remains and how terribly far we have to go to eliminate inequalities.

The oft-cited example of health reform success is Massachusetts, where Blue Cross Blue Shield 2013 estimates indicate that about 97 percent of the state’s population has health insurance thanks to health reform. While this is a grand feat for gaining an insurance card, insurance alone does not constitute affordable, quality care, or improved long-term health and equity. The real successes come from improved statistics on accessing care, preventative care and disease reduction.

For those looking to Massachusetts, data does support a slight improvement in overall access to care by showing that Whites, Blacks and Hispanics all had increases in the number of insured, and further that the percentage of the state’s population that had “any doctor visit in prior year” between 2006 and 2009 rose by more than five percent.

Unfortunately, as many have argued, those for and against health reform, Massachusetts is not necessarily a good representation of other US states or populations, as anyone who has been to Massachusetts knows that the state population looks and behaves very differently from places such as southern California or the Southside of Chicago. Furthermore, even in Massachusetts the number of Blacks and Hispanics that remain uninsured is two and three times that of Whites, respectively.

Many of those who will be left uninsured will be Blacks, immigrants and Hispanics, who will continue to use Emergency Departments for critical care or, worse, go untreated.

Additionally, there are those who are lower middle class (a growing group in this nation) who fall into the economic gap where they cannot afford the employer/exchange insurance offered to them, but earn too much to receive subsidies for offsetting the mandatory cost of insurance, which are often people of color.

Other groups of concern are those minorities who do not have the knowledge of where to access care, do not have the financial or transportation means to access care or still distrust the system due to systemic problems with culturally competent care.

Although the ACA takes us a step forward in giving many of the countries uninsured an insurance card, the US must address what to do about probable provider shortages that will result from a lack of primary care physicians and different utilization in care. We must be prepared to understand both to cultural differences in demand and pent-up demand of the previously uninsured, as well as start to really face how to deal with persistent racial and ethnic inequality in this nation that shows itself in our health care system every day.

In the coming weeks, months and years the US citizens have to do more than champion or attempt to repeal the ACA. Party lines and moderate attempts at change will never fix our broken health care system. We have to start addressing the real issues our country faces, those of injustice, unequal access and treatment and how we properly care for and address the needs of those who are not White and wealthy.

 

What If The Supreme Court Strikes Down the Individual Mandate?

Any ruling by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s controversial individual mandate isn’t likely for at least another several months, but it’s worth thinking about what might happen after the case is decided. The first scenario is easy: If the Court upholds the mandate, the ACA goes forward as planned to the continued objections of many conservative Americans and politicians. The second scenario is less clear: If the Court finds the mandate unconstitutional, do they find it severable from the rest of the law? If not, they’ll strike the whole ACA down. This seems like the least likely outcome. If, on the other hand, they do invoke severability, the ball is back in the White House’s court. The decision at that point would be whether or not health reform can be successful without the individual mandate.

The concern here is the death spiral first described by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In essence, if we don’t require everyone to buy insurance, then insurance will be disproportionately purchased by the sick, making it more expensive and leading many to discontinue coverage in a continuous cycle that drives the price higher and higher until no one can afford insurance any more and the system collapses. By contrast, getting everyone into the pool is seen as the only way to keep costs down and maintain the insurance system. So the question is: What happens if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate? Does the Obama adminsitration wash its hands of health reform, proclaiming that it can’t be done without the individual mandate because costs will rise too rapidly and the insurance system will collapse, or does it forge onward and see what happens?

Option one is the safe bet if you believe that a bad status quo is better than a potentially worse change, but it’s absolutely terrible politics. It would be admitting defeat on one of the defining aspects of the Obama presidency. Moreover, it would have tremendous negative implications for the future of health reform initiatives generally. Option two looks good politically for all of the opposite reasons, but it could destroy the health insurance market and hurt Americans in the process. That’s bad leadership. While such action might lead to the type of catastrophic collapse necessary to precipitate true change, it would be incredibly painful.

New evidence suggests, however, that the pain might not be as great as many–myself included–fear. John Sheils and Randall Haught of the Lewin Group ran a simulation model to see what might happen to coverage and costs if reform went forward as planned with the exception of the individual mandate. Remember, the concern is that fewer people would be covered and health insurance premiums would increase. What they found is that, yes, compared to estimates under health reform with an individual mandate, health reform without the individual mandate would mean fewer people would be covered and insurance premiums would increase, but things would still be better than if we did nothing at all.

How much better? Well, without reform, they estimate that 51.6 million Americans would be uninsured. With reform, that number drops to 20.7 million. With reform, but without the mandate, their estimate stands at 28.5 million. Not too shabby. As for premiums, the authors estimate that eliminating the individual mandate will mean a 12.6% increase. Not a welcome increase, but not necessarily the kiss of the death spiral.
That said, other estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber have not been as optimistic. The CBO expects that axing the individual mandate will mean 16 million fewer insured persons and a premium increase between 15 and 20%. Gruber puts the figures at 24 million fewer insured and premium increases on the order of 27%. Because of the sheer volume of people involved and the uncertainty of their decision making processes, it’s really hard to know who’s calculations are the most reasonable.

What you can count on is this: If the Court finds the individual mandate unconstitutional, the White House will have more actuaries and health economists crunching numbers than you can imagine. These latest results from Lewin suggest that even if the Court says no to the individual mandate, it shouldn’t necessarily mean the Obama adminsitration should give up on health reform.

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How Many Uninsured Will Medicaid Cover After Health Reform?

One of the major components of the Affordable Care Act is the extension of Medicaid eligibility to all citizens and legal residents who earn below 133% of the federal poverty level. As of 2011, that is approximately not a lot of money. Prior to the ACA, Medicaid eligibility was contingent on satisfying both income eligibility and categorical eligibility criteria, the former meaning you had to be poor and the latter meaning you had to be the “right” type of person to qualify. For example, poor pregnant women qualified, poor childless adults did not. Prior to the ACA, people who thought Medicaid was a program for poor people were only partially right. Fortunately for these people, without having to change their thinking, the implementation of the ACA will make them right. Medicaid will now be for everyone who is low-income. It’s much simpler and makes more sense, but the big question is: How will it work?

We already know that there are a number of people eligible for Medicaid coverage currently who are not enrolled in the program. It stands to reason, then, that when more people become eligible, some fraction of them will not enroll. How many do enroll will be important for many reasons: covering these folks was a major goal of health reform, newly insured individuals will need more doctors to care for them, and all of this will have an effect on health care costs. It would be helpful if we could anticipate–if not predict–the future, which is exactly what the Congressional Budget Office and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have tried to do. The problem is that they appear to be using two different crystal balls.

The CBO says that 16 million will gain coverage, while CMS says 18 million. Somebody’s wrong. My hunch is that it’s CMS, because they assume that 97% of newly eligible people will enroll in Medicaid. That seems awfully high to me. It also seems high to some health economists at Harvard who have the next best thing to a crystal ball: a simulation model. Benjamin Sommers, Katherine Swartz, and Arnold Epstein have a paper coming out in Health Affairs that considers all of the major factors that will determine how many people will be eligible and how many will enroll and calculates these estimates under a variety of assumptions that range from conservative to bold. According to their model, about 13.4 million people will newly enroll in Medicaid because of the ACA. However, using different assumptions, they come up with a 95% confidence interval that ranges from 8.5 million to 22.4 million people. That, folks, is a pretty large amount of uncertainty. The good news is that more people will be covered. The bad news is that we really won’t know how many until happens, which means we won’t be able to do too much planning ahead.

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An Early Victory for Health Reform

When the Affordable Care Act was enacted, there was immediate and enormous uncertainty about how the law would be implemented, whether or not it would be successful, and how its success or failure would be recognized. Proponents pointed to economic theory and Romneycare in Massachusetts, suggesting that we’d see a decrease in the number of uninsured initially, followed–hopefully–by a reduction in the rate of health care spending growth. Opponents, meanwhile, shook their collective heads and began filing lawsuits over the constitutionality of the individual mandate, and those cases are still winding their way through the courts.

While the ACA is still in its infancy, with numerous provisions of the law yet to be implemented, there is now evidence that health reform is doing its job. To be sure, a tremendous amount of uncertainty remains, but the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the number of uninsured Americans remains unchanged between 2009 and 2010. Though health reform critics might like to jump on that statistic and proclaim that the ACA has failed to cover more Americans, history proves otherwise.

The U.S. economy–while supposedly no longer in a recession–is far from robust. Historically, economic downturns coincide with increases in the number of uninsured, as people lose their jobs and, thanks to the design of our health care system, their insurance coverage. So, the unchanged number of uninsured masks what actually happened: Roughly 810,000 middle-aged adults, those ages 45 to 64, were likely let go from their jobs, didn’t yet qualify for Medicare, and ended up uninsured. Meanwhile, some 494,000 young adults, those ages 18 to 25, gained coverage, which seems to point to the ACA provision allowing children to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26 that went into effect in the fall of 2010. Of course, there may be other explanations, but the simplest explanation is likely the right one.

Assuming that the ACA continues to reduce the number of uninsured, the bigger question is what happens to costs after it is fully implemented. A large part of this will hinge on consumer behavior, and the news here is mixed. There is emerging evidence that uninsured patients don’t dramatically alter their care-seeking after gaining coverage. In some cases, this is a good thing. For example, in Massachusetts, the uninsured being served by community health centers continued to seek care there even after they were insured. That’s good news for the health centers, which would otherwise be left with an even heavier burden of uncompensated care than they currently face, and it’s good news for the health care system, because health centers are widely recognized as high quality, cost effective primary care providers. Expanding that model could help to bend the cost curve.

At the same, however, there is evidence from the University of Pennsylvania’s Dan Polsky and colleagues that the uninsured who become Medicare eligible don’t change their behavior either. In particular, they continue to have lower rates of physician office-visits and higher rates of emergency room and hospital outpatient department use. That’s bad news, because those sources of care are notoriously more expensive and present an obstacle to continuity of care.

Consequently, the future is uncertain. The promise of the ACA to reduce the number of uninsured remains intact, but what happens to health care costs will be determined largely by the actions of tens of millions of newly insured persons. If ever there was a time to help patients make informed decisions regarding their use of the health care system, that time is now.

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Simulating the Effects of Health Reform on the Uninsured

With all of the back-and-forth over health reform, it sure would be nice if we knew just how things would turn out as a result of the new law. After all, if we could demonstrate with some certainty that it would actually do a lot of good for a lot of people, some of its detractors might be silenced. At the same time, if it looked like things weren’t going to pan out, then perhaps the law ought to be repealed. Unfortunately, predicting the future is a difficult thing to do, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

Enter Mark Hall, a professor from Wake Forest University, and Matthew Buettgens, an analyst at the Urban Institute. Using the Urban Institute’s Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model, Hall and Buettgens attempt to predict the future of the uninsured under health reform. Such simulations rely heavily on assumptions, and some of the assumptions are stronger than others. HHS is still writing regulations, for example, so what exactly those may contain is still a pretty open-ended question. But there is evidence to support some of the assumptions. For example, we can look at the experience of states, like Massachusetts, that have passed a similar law to see what has happened there, and we can base our assumptions on a body of prior research and theory that can help predict how people will respond to a variety of incentives.

Of course, this is where the mutual fund disclaimer enters: Evidence of past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. That’s certainly a valid caution, but when it comes to predicting the future, the past is often the best information we have. In fact, it’s the only thing we know with certainty. Anyone who makes claims about what will happen that aren’t based at least in part on what has happened before, may as well be blindly throwing darts.

Now, I’m not going to delve into the details of Hall and Buettgens’ work, for fear of losing some of you along the way, but you can read their report here. The take-home message is simple: Health reform will cover most, but not all, of the currently uninsured. Among those who remain uninsured, a little more than one-in-five would be undocumented immigrants who are exempt from the individual mandate and ineligible for federal assistance. Another two-in-five would be Medicaid eligible, but not yet enrolled, underscoring the importance of outreach and eligibility assistance efforts. Of the remainder, some would be exempt from the mandate for a variety of reasons, while others would be subject to the penalty for not having coverage, even though many of them would be eligible for a federal subsidy of their premiums.

Overall, health reform will lead to a reduction in the number of uninsured, but the full effect will take time as people will have to be educated about their options, purchase coverage, or be enrolled in Medicaid. It would be interesting to look at a multi-year projection, to see how reductions in the uninsured change over time as implementation rolls out. It’s pretty safe to assume–based on the experience in Massachusetts–that even a decade after full-implementation, we still won’t have reached everyone, for a myriad of reasons. But that’s to be expected, and shouldn’t dissuade the effort. After all, in two states I care about, Georgia and North Carolina, Hall and Buettgens project that the proportion of the population that is uninsured will fall by 12.6% and 10.4%, respectively. But percentages are a statistic. Numbers are people. And combined, nearly 2 million Georgians and North Carolinians will gain insurance coverage in the first year after health reform is implemented. With results like that, I personally cannot imagine repealing health reform.

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