The new health reform law is the best and most politically feasible option to extend health coverage to the most residents while keeping government costs low, according to a new RAND study published Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, the Wall Street Journal's "Health Blog" reports (Hobson, "Health Blog," Wall Street Journal, 6/8).
For the study, researchers analyzed more than 2,000 policy scenarios that modified factors such as:
- Income eligibility for Medicaid;
- Penalties for not complying with insurance mandates; and
- Size of the companies that are required to provide coverage for their workers (Clark, HealthLeaders Media, 6/8).
Cost of Alternative Scenarios
The new reform law is expected to extend health coverage to approximately 28 million more U.S. residents by 2016 (HealthDay/U.S. News & World Report, 6/8).
To cover four million more people at the same cost, researchers determined that the penalty for not abiding by the individual insurance mandate would need to be 47% higher, which they conclude would be politically unfeasible ("Health Blog," Wall Street Journal, 6/8).
The study also found that the cost of the reform law could be reduced by $20 billion without decreasing the number of newly insured U.S. residents. However, researchers said such reductions would require enacting policies that "place a higher burden on the lowest-income segment of the population," such as less generous subsidies and a smaller expansion of Medicaid (HealthLeaders Media, 6/8).