Normative Narratives

Tag Archives: CBO


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How to Compromise and Fix the ACA

 

Time to Replace Those Repeal Attempts

The Senate’s latest attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have all failed to pass.

The most comprehensive attempt, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, was voted down 43-57. Defections came from both sides of the GOP–some thought the bill was too hard on low and middle income people, while others thought it left too much of the ACA in place.

With repeal and replace off the table, President Trump changed his tune from “repeal and replace” to “repeal, then [try to] replace”. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast that “a plan to repeal Obamacare without replacing it could cost 32 million Americans their health insurance by 2026…at the same time, premiums on individual insurance plans would rise 25 percent next year and double by 2026 if Obamacare is repealed.” This effort also failed to gain enough support in the Senate, as it was defeated 45-55.

These CBO projections and Senate votes reflect the fact that people do not want to go back to the pre-ACA days when they could be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions. As the reality of the modern economy pushes back the typical age of financial independence, the ACA provision allowing young adults to stay on their parents health insurance until 26 has bipartisan support. Minimum standards ensure people who pay for coverage are actually covered when it is time to receive treatment. The individual mandate, while unpopular, ensures a reasonably healthy risk pool for insurers.

All this is to say that the ACA, while imperfect, was designed the way it was for a reason. “A la carte ACA” or the “skinny repeal” would not work, particularly without the individual mandate. Sicker risk pools would lead to a “death spiral“, driving up premiums for middle class customers and subsidy costs for the Government, all while increasing the number of uninsured. For those still keeping score at home, the CBO estimated the “skinny repeal” would result in 16 million Americans losing health insurance over a decade and raise insurance premiums by 20 percent in January. Thankfully, the “skinny repeal” also failed in the Senate, 49-51.

[In other news, the GOP wants to gut the CBO–talk about shooting the messenger]

With so many failed repeal efforts, it is clearly time to try to work towards improving the ACA. Many of the ACAs problems are the result of a lack of competition (see the map above)–private insurers are simply not participating in certain markets, particularly in rural areas (a problem that is expected to get worse in 2018).

The solution to this market failure is to create competition by allowing people to buy into the Medicaid “Public Option”.

I can already hear the outrage from Conservatives–“of course a liberal’s answer is more government”–but hear me out. The Public Option need not increase government spending drastically; people would receive healthcare at cost, but they would still pay–this is not a Medicaid for all as an entitlement proposal. Sure, administrative costs for the government would rise as the program absorbed more people, but the marginal cost of providing care for people who are currently ineligible for Medicaid should be close to zero (some scaling would be needed to smooth costs for people just above Medicaid thresholds).

Furthermore, with the Public Option in place, Medicaid would be in even better position to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, a cost-saving idea championed by many, including President Trump.

Of course, in order to garner support for a Medicaid Public Option, concessions must be made to conservatives.

Removing the employer mandate:

With a reliable, affordable option that covered all essential health benefits, people would have a much clearer economic decision to make–accept a job that pays less but offers insurance, or take a job that pays more knowing they have to set aside a certain amount for insurance. The Public Option would make buying health insurance a predictable financial choice for the first time in American history.

This concession tackles a major criticism of the ACA–small businesses would no longer be required to factor in the cost of providing health insurance when deciding whether or not to hire more employees.

A higher employee threshold could also be kept in place to ensure larger corporations offer a health insurance option to their employees

Reviving Ted Cruz’s Essential Benefits Plan:

For those not familiar with it, Ted Cruz proposed a plan in which health insurers would be able to offer non-ACA complaint plans–ones that do not cover all essential health benefits–as long as they offer a plan that does cover them as well.

Clearly marking which plans do and do not cover all essential health benefits would be important, but it would also be easy enough. The real issue with Cruz’s plan was there was no way to ensure the ACA-compliant plan was being offered at a reasonable rate, and not just as a token to unlock the right to sell non-compliant plans. 

But with the Public Option, it wouldn’t really matter; if the ACA plan was offered at an unaffordable rate, people would have the choice to opt-in to the Public Option. 

This concession tackles another major criticism of the ACA–people would no longer have to buy insurance covering care they don’t feel they need.

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President Trump said “Obamacare is Death”, while Senate majority leader McConnell called it a “nightmare”–empty hyperbole meant to scare people who do not know better. In the darkest of ironies, their very replacement ideas would have truly be a living nightmare for millions, and would have lead to many preventable deaths.

In defeat, President Trump tweeted (of course he did) to just let Obamacare fail. There is much his administration can still do to undermine the laws effectiveness if it truly prioritizes political vendettas over the well-being of American citizens. The GOP has (thankfully) proven it can still be the party of “No” when it comes to Healthcare, even when it is the majority party. Now is the time to see if it can be the party of “Yes” for a stronger, bipartisan plan, the American people want and deserve.

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Update (8/24)

Every U.S. county is expected to have an insurer in the 2018 Obamacare marketplaces. However, having one insurer does not mean there is competition or choice. 1,478 counties could have only one insurer in 2018, potentially leaving customers without an affordable option.

Expect more updates as 2018 plans are finalized in the coming weeks.

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Economic Outlook: Of Minimum Wages and Employment (Revisited)

Another hot button topic during the 2014 midterm election season are candidates stances on increasing the federal minimum wage.

This past February, the CBO released its analysis of the effects of a federal minimum wage increase on economic growth, employment, and poverty. Those on the political right seized on the reports projection that raising the minimum wage could result in 1 million fewer jobs in America.

I found Jared Bernstein’s Economix blog on the subject pretty even-handed (click here to see my previous blog on the topic):

It is important to recognize that there is a very wide range of estimates from which the budget agency can choose, as shown in the chart below, which plots results of the employment effect from dozens of studies (from a recent set of slides from the White House Council of Economic Advisers).  This wide range does not imply that the budget office made a mistake, though it looks to me as if it applied a higher job-loss estimate than is the current consensus among economists who’ve closely studied the issue.

Note:

As the chart shows, the employment impact from this “meta-analysis” clumps around zero, which is why the report finds that the policy is a significant net plus from the perspective of low-wage workers: Many more workers get a raise from the policy than are displaced from their jobs.” (Jared Bernstein, Economix blog)

There is no policy I can think of that generates only benefits without any costs, and policy makers always have to weigh the two sides. In the case of the minimum wage, on the benefits side of ledger, the budget office shows that 16.5 million low-wage workers would directly get a much-needed pay increase at no cost to the federal budget.

16.5 million workers will benefit from a $10.10 minimum wage by 2016, 900,000 will be raised out of poverty, with negligible effects on the federal budget.

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The CBO report was a projection. What have minimum wage “experiments”, carried out in America’s “laboratories of democracy” (states and municipalities), revealed?

The White House told us they were referring to the seasonally adjusted growth of non-farm jobs since December 2013. So we crunched the numbers for state-level employment data, which is collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The comparison involved nine states that increased their minimum wage automatically early in the year to keep pace with inflation (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington) plus four more states that passed new laws to hike the wage (Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island). The other side consisted of 37 states that didn’t boost their minimum wage at all.

Using the second method — the one that gives greater weight to high-population states — we found that job growth over that eight-month period averaged 1.092 percent in the wage-raising states, compared to 1.090 percent in the non-wage-raising states. That’s a higher rate of job growth in the minimum-wage-raising states — but by the almost comically narrow margin of 2/1,000ths of one percent.

From this 8-month comparative analysis, we can see that minimum wage changes have had essentially no impact on employment levels. The meta-analysis seems to have been vindicated–I guess economists are good for something after-all.

What does this mean? Which stance on minimum wage increases has been vindicated? I would say it has to be the pro-minimum-wage-increase side of the debate.

Increasing the federal minimum wage is not meant to be a “job-creating” policy; its primary purpose is to redistribute income from the top of the economic pyramid (wage payers) to the bottom (wage earners). It is a “market” solution that does not require taxation and welfare spending, so money would not go to those “lazy welfare recipients” (this is not my view, however a significant proportion of Americans do view welfare recipients this way, and it is necessary to consider alternative perspectives when trying to pass legislation in a democracy).

One may think such an inequality / poverty reducing solution would be agreeable to proponents of “small government”, and one would be wrong. Since opponents of increasing the minimum wage cannot assail deficit spending going to undeserving recipients, they have relied on the “jobs lost” argument. Fortunately, this argument becomes less and less viable the more it is challenged and disproven.

Raising the minimum wage does not just address the “symptoms” of inequality / poverty–there are important long term / inter-generational implications of minimum wage increases. Having more money enables people to build their skills, take more entrepreneurial risks, and provide better upbringings for their children (which obviously affects their earning capacity later in life).

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“Meta-analysis” of the effects of minimum wage increases on employment clustered around zero, and these findings have been backed up by the non-partisan statistics produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I work for the BLS, although my job has nothing to do with employment statistics).

The mechanism by which minimum wage increases raises poorer peoples income is straightforward. How people would choose to use their new-found income is less straightforward–some will predominately invest in into their and their families futures, while others will use the majority for instant gratification. While not as targeted as a welfare program, raising the minimum wage is the most politically viable solution to America’s inequality problems.

Contemporary American political discourse is dominated by the related themes of “equality of opportunity” and “social mobility”. Raising the federal minimum wage would bring immediate relief to America’s poorest workers, while moving closer to the utopian goal of “equality of opportunity”. Furthermore, it would accomplish these goals without any meaningful impact on employment rates or the federal budget.

Some redistribution of income in necessary; inequality is a drag on economic growth, and poverty is a root cause of many other societal ills. History has proven over and over again that “trickle-down” economics does not work. Minimum wages should also be linked to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), periodically (once per year?) increasing to reflect changes in cost of living.

If our federal government continues to fail in this regard, leaders at the state and municipal level must step-up–this is a matter of both present and future socioeconomic justice.

 


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Economic Outlook: Of Minimum Wages and Employment

The CBO released its analysis of the employment and budgetary effects of minimum wage increase yesterday. Advocates from both sides of the isle will seize on the reports findings to “prove their point” about the (de)merits of increasing the minimum wage. I found Jared Bernstein’s Economix blog on the subject pretty even-handed:

It is important to recognize that there is a very wide range of estimates from which the budget agency can choose, as shown in the chart below, which plots results of the employment effect from dozens of studies (from a recent set of slides from the White House Council of Economic Advisers).  This wide range does not imply that the budget office made a mistake, though it looks to me as if it applied a higher job-loss estimate than is the current consensus among economists who’ve closely studied the issue.

Note:

As the chart shows, the employment impact from this “meta-analysis” clumps around zero, which is why the report finds that the policy is a significant net plus from the perspective of low-wage workers: Many more workers get a raise from the policy than are displaced from their jobs.

In fact, the study points out that the range, or confidence interval, around their central estimate ranges from a “very slight decrease” to one million.  The authors guess that there’s a two-thirds chance that the true estimate is in that range.

There is no policy I can think of that generates only benefits without any costs, and policy makers always have to weigh the two sides. In the case of the minimum wage, on the benefits side of ledger, the budget office shows that 16.5 million low-wage workers would directly get a much-needed pay increase at no cost to the federal budget.

—

There is one paragraph of the report Bernstein does not seize on, which I believe merits greater consideration:

An increase in the minimum wage also affects the
employment of low-wage workers in the short term
through changes in the economy-wide demand for goods
and services. A higher minimum wage shifts income from
higher-wage consumers and business owners to low-wage
workers. Because those low-wage workers tend to spend a
larger fraction of their earnings, some firms see increased
demand for their goods and services, boosting the
employment of low-wage workers and higher-wage
workers alike. That effect is larger when the economy is
weaker, and it is larger in regions of the country where
the economy is weaker. (p. 7)

The positive employment effect of increasing the minimum wage (redistributing money to lower income individuals who, by definition, spend a greater share of every dollar earned; i.e. people who have a higher “marginal propensity to consume”) is “larger when the economy is weaker“.

Can there be any question that the economy is currently very weak? Specifically, aggregate demand is most depressed for the poorest, who have seen decreases in real household income over the past decade(s) (as opposed to the wealthiest 1%, who have captured 95% of income gains since 2009).

It is, therefore, quite reasonable to assume that job losses will be closer to the “very slight decrease” end of the CBO range, if indeed they are negative at all (an assumption that is directly in line with “the current consensus of economists who have studied the issue closely”).

The other findings of the report are fairly straightforward: 16.5 million workers will benefit from a $10.10 minimum wage by 2016, 900,000 will be raised out of poverty, with negligible effects on the federal budget:

“CBO concludes that the net effect on the federal
budget of raising the minimum wage would probably be
a small decrease in budget deficits for several years but a
small increase in budget deficits thereafter.” (p. 14)

Given that any budget forecast after “several years from now” borders on divination, one can even conclude that raising the minimum wage would actually result in a net gain for the federal budget. Spending on automatic stabilizers will fall (automatically) as poorer families / individuals rise above certain income thresholds. On the other hand, lower tax revenues are estimated to come from wealthier individuals, whom tend to find ways to have an effective tax rates below what their income bracket would suggest. In other words, spending cuts will occur automatically, while drops in tax revenue are considering tax revenues that may never have been realized in the first place.

As Mr. Bernstein concluded, no policy change is without trade-offs. However, it seems pretty clear that, in the current context, the benefits of increasing the minimum wage far outweigh the losses. So when you hear conservative politicians beating the “1,000,000 jobs lost drum” and/or the “increasing the deficit drum” over the next few  months, question whether that estimate is reasonable or simply an attempt to turn public support against a common sense policy reform.