The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBS) released a report on October 14 outlining possible effects of health care reform legislation, including estimating that the legislation would increase the price of average annual medical claims for individual policies by 50% in five years.   

From the report:

Insurance reforms alone will substantially increase claims costs in the individual market. The individual market “risk pool” will be less healthy than today and will drive higher insurance premiums. We estimate the average medical claims for the uninsured are 20 percent higher than claims in the current individual market. In addition, certain segments with high medical utilization who are now insured through other arrangements will enter the individual market as a result of guaranteed issue and modified community rating requirements. This includes people enrolled in state high risk pools, people on COBRA through their former employers’ coverage, and other group conversion policies.

Blue Cross Blue Shield. (2009). Insurance reforms must include a strong individual mandate and other key provisions to ensure affordability. Wyman, Oliver.

Full report: http://www.bcbs.com/issues/uninsured/background/Oliver-Wyman-Report-Showing-Impact-of-Healthcare-Reform-on-Premiums-pdf.pdf

This report, released by the Center for Rural Affairs and the Center for Community Change, highlights the unique challenges of rural health care.  The report notes that rural communities have a lower rate of employer-sponsored insurance because rural economies rely more heavily on small businesses and self-employment.  The report also finds that rural areas have twice the rate of underinsurance as urban areas and that rural residents pay 22 percent more for health coverage than those living near metropolitan areas.

Full Report: http://www.communitychange.org/library/CCC-sweet-hivfin.pdf/idea_view 

Center for Rural Affairs and Center for Community Change. (2009). Sweet the bitter drought why rural America needs health care reform. Jon Bailey, Sally Kohn & Angie Evans

This Migration Policy Institute (MPI) report finds that current health care reform proposals do little to help immigrants, including legal permanent residents.  MPI finds that 4.2 million of the 12 million legal immigrants in the U.S. are currently uninsured and notes that many are temporarily barred from state Medicaid programs because of a 1996 law requiring that legal aliens wait five years from the date they obtain their green card before becoming eligible for Medicaid.  The report finds that maintaining that restriction and applying it to the government health insurance subsidies for individuals earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) will limit health insurance access for over 1 million legal immigrants.  In addition, the report examines the cost implications of limiting health insurance access for both legal and illegal immigrants under various health reform proposals. 

Full Report: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/healthcare-Oct09.pdf 

Migration Policy Institute. (2009). Immigrants and health care reform what's really at stake? Randy Capps, Marc R. Rosenblum, Michael Fix.

A report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and released by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) on October 12, estimates that the Senate Finance Committee’s health care reform legislation could add $1,700 to family health insurance premiums by 2013 and could raise family premiums by over $4,000 by 2019.

From the report:

America's Health Insurance Plans engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to examine the impact of four components of the health reform bill being proposed by the Senate Finance Committee as introduced. These include:

• Insurance market reforms and consumer protections that would raise health insurance premiums for individuals and families if the reforms are not coupled with an effective coverage requirement.
• An excise tax on employer-sponsored high value health plans (or "Cadillac plans") that in a few years could also raise premiums for some moderate value plans.
• Cuts in payment rates in public programs that could increase cost shifting to private sector businesses and consumers. These changes are expected to more than offset the potential reduction in cost shifting resulting from providing coverage to the uninsured.
• New taxes on health sector entities that are likely to be passed through to consumers.
• The increases in private health insurance coverage described above would be on top of the underlying growth in medical costs over the coming period.

 This analysis shows that the cost of the average family coverage is approximately $12,300 today and could be expected to increase to approximately:

• $15,500 in 2013 under current law and to $17,200 if these provisions are implemented.
• $18,400 in 2016 under current law and to $21,300 if these provisions are implemented.
• $21,900 in 2019 under current law and to $25,900 if these provisions are implemented.

Price Waterhouse Coopers. (2009).  Potential impact of health reform on the cost of private health insurance coverage.

Full report: http://www.politico.com/static/PPM116_pwc2.html

A new fact sheet published by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research finds that 93 percent of Californians under 65 would have access to health coverage if Congress passes a national health reform bill.  Four million state residents would be eligible for Medi-Cal or would qualify for subsidies to purchase private insurance.

From the document:

If leading proposals in Congress for national health care reform are enacted, most of California’s 6.4 million nonelderly adults and children who were uninsured for all or part of the year in 2007 would directly benefit. The three major proposals in both the House and Senate all would make two key changes: 1) they will expand Medicaid eligibility to include qualified uninsured adults and children with household incomes up to 133% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL); and 2) they will provide public subsidies to enable qualified uninsured adults and children with household incomes from 134 – 400% FPL to purchase insurance.1 An estimated four million Californians would be newly eligible either for public health insurance (in Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program) or for public subsidies to purchase private coverage.

UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. (2009). National Health Care Reform Will Help Four Million Uninsured Adults and Children in California. Lavarreda, Shana & Brown, E. Richard.

Fact sheet: http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/pubs/files/HCR_FS_10-09.pdf

A report released by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget presents analyses of federal health care reform legislation using data from the CBO, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Joint Commission on Taxation, and the Library of Congress, to conclude that none of the bills does enough to control health care costs.

From the report:

Even setting that $245 billion aside, though, the House still fails to achieve anything more than token deficit neutrality. Although the bill would technically balance out over ten years – excluding the updates – this would largely be due to surpluses collected before the implementation of the coverage measures. As the bill is written, surpluses would turn to deficits by 2014 (or in 2015 if we exclude the cost of physician payment updates), and these deficits would grow every year, reaching $65 billion by 2019. Even excluding the cost of updating physician payments, the bill would still increase the deficit by around $25 billion in 2019.

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget . (2009). Evaluating health care plans: an analysis of the short- and long-term fiscal implications of reform plans.

Full report: http://crfb.org/sites/default/files/Evaluating_Health_Care_Plans.pdf