The Health Care Blog: Last Chance to Fix the Exchanges

by Matthew

We all know that well-designed health insurance exchanges are a critical element for good health reform, right?  And we also hear that exchanges are part of all five reform bills in Congress, so we should be satisfied, right?  Wrong.  There are some good design elements in the various bills, but the best components from each need to be pulled together as the bills are merged, amended, and worked over in conference. Health insurance exchanges are arguably the key to successful reform, but most of the recent health reform debate has focused on other issues – subsidies for low-income people, the penalty for noncompliance with the individual mandate, taxes on high cost insurance plans, cost containment measures, protections against high out-of-pocket expenses, etc.  Many of the other elements can be tweaked if we don’t get them quite right in the first version of reform, but it’s critical to establish the right design framework for exchanges at the beginning. There are three design elements that are crucial to achieving these goals:

How big? Who’s in?  Size is important; as Sen. Olympia Snowe put it, “The more the merrier.”  Sufficient size will attract more insurers and offer wider choice to consumers in the exchange.  It will also enable the insurers to achieve economies of scale and reduce administrative costs and premiums.  And allowing more categories of groups into the exchange will allow more people to get the benefits of expanded choice, reduced hassle for administering health benefits, and improved portability of health coverage.   How to avoid the “death spiral”.   Many exchanges in the past have collapsed when high cost people joined and stayed in the exchange while low cost people purchased coverage outside the exchange.  Ideally, the exchange would be the sole market for individuals and small groups.  Since this is probably unrealistic politically, it is necessary to put in place mechanisms to minimize the danger of the death spiral.  For example:

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