The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Workers’ Health Insurance Coverage
Source:
The New England Journal of Medicine (by Christine Eibner, PhD, Peter S. Hussey, PhD, and Federico Girosi, PhD)
- A team at RAND Corporation created a microsimulation to predict how and why health insurance markets are likely to be affected by health care reform implementation, looking specifically at how the new insurance exchanges will affect businesses. The exchanges intend to lessen some of the challenges small firms face when providing their employees with insurance.
- The model includes the individual mandate, penalties for firms with more than 50 workers that do not offer coverage, a Medicaid expansion to include persons with incomes as high as 133 percent of the federal poverty level, and the creation of state health insurance exchanges for individuals and firms with 100 or fewer workers.
- The microsimulation results show that the new law could result in a large net increase in employer-sponsored insurance from 115.1 million to 128.7 million after the reform. The increase is said to be driven by a greater demand for coverage by workers due to individual penalties for being uninsured and the availability of new insurance options for small businesses that offer coverage in the exchanges.
- The study concludes that many employers offering coverage through the exchanges will have a wider risk pool, lower administrative costs and expanded choices.
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