Tuesday, September 30, 2014

People at Risk of Losing Their Health Subsidies

Recently, the Obama Administration has notified hundreds of thousands individuals who signed-up for health care plans with HealthCare.gov that they could potentially lose some or all of their health subsidies if they they do not provide additional information that correlates with IRS data. With a Tuesday deadline, these individuals also face the risk of also owing the government for receiving subsidies they were not eligible for. Most of the documentation issues regard data-matching problems on incomes and citizenship/ immigration status.

Thoughts?

Should the government be blamed for these problems due to the difficulties and technical problems that the Affordable Health Care Act website has?


http://online.wsj.com/articles/hundreds-of-thousands-face-health-law-subsidy-deadline-1412006417

5 comments:

  1. There are many issues with the Health Care Act that need to be addressed. I believe that if subsidies were in fact given out to undeserving citizens then they should have to pay them back because they accepted aid from the government that they were not qualified for. However the government needs to have better communication on the qualifications for subsidies and the punishment for taking an undeserved one so that citizens are fully aware if they should receive the subsidy or not. The government also needs to address the data validation issue as it appears as if many of the errors were the result of an inefficient system of tracking and processing citizenship and income forms. In this case the blame lies on the administrative staff of the Affordable Health Care Act for not being prepared to handle the incoming data.

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  3. I agree with Scott above, but also there are something like 5.4 million people that obtained health care premium subsidies through the Affordable Care Act. That means roughly 5% percent of subscribers have been sent this notice that their data doesn't match up. What determines a good "success" rate here? Is 5% an outrageous number to have turned away from the health care program or is it understandable, given the sheer volume of data? I would assume that most of these cases are not examples of individuals "using" the system, but rather of data discrepancies from the 2012 and 2014 tax returns. I think this will not be as big of a news story once most of these cases are resolved.

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  4. This is a good example of a transaction cost that comes from having a subsidized private system rather than a purely private or purely public system.

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