December 09, 2013
Ross Douthat raises an interesting issue in his column on Obamacare. Douthat suggests that Obamacare may not succeed elsewhere in the same way as it did in Massachusetts because people don’t feel as warmly inclined toward the government in other states.
There are several pieces of Douthat’s story that aren’t quite right. First, this is private insurance, not government insurance. It’s not clear how people think they would be making a strike against the government by not buying private insurance, but we can skip that one.
Douthat also follows the pack in buying the young invincible story. The key to the success of Obamacare is getting healthy people to sign up. It doesn’t matter what age they are. In fact, the program gets three times as much money out of every healthy senior as it does from a healthy twenty five-year-old. In fact, the gap is likely to be even larger since young people are more likely to get a subsidy since their income is on average lower.
But it is at least possible that we will see the adverse selection story that Douthat raises, although the outcome will not be quite what he envisions. Under Obamacare each state is effectively its own pool.
Clearly there are other states where people are likely to act like the people in Massachusetts and sign up for health insurance. But there could also be states, let’s call them Texas, where many healthy people may decide that as a matter of principle they will not sign up for Obamacare.
This would give us the classic death spiral. If fewer healthy people sign up for insurance then the cost of the insurance will rise. This will lead more relatively healthy people to opt not to sign up. That would further raise the cost of insurance, leading more people to drop insurance. The end game is that Obamacare in these states could end up as a shell. The costs could be so high that almost no one takes advantage of the exchanges and instead just pays the penalty.
This would create a striking gap between the states where Obamacare worked and the exchanges were running well and Texas, where a large share of the population would not have insurance. We have already seen a split along these lines with the refusal of Texas and other states controlled by Republicans to expand Medicaid with federal funds, as provided for under the ACA. However the collapse of the exchanges would affect a much larger and more politically influential segment of the population. This would directly affect the security of middle class workers.
It’s not clear that the people of Texas would be happy with the outcome of their individual decisions if the collapse of the exchanges really was the outcome. Tens of millions of workers in the non-Texas states would enjoy security in their health insurance. If they lost their jobs or had some other adverse set of events they would still be able to buy a reasonably priced insurance plan. That would not be the case in Texas.
That outcome would be unfortunate for the people of Texas, but it might lead to an interesting political dynamic.
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