Adverse Reactions: Structure, Philosophy, and Outcomes of the Affordable Care Act

YALE LAW & POLICY REVIEW Adverse Reactions: Structure, Philosophy, and Outcomes of the Affordable Care Act Michael Lee, Jr.* INTRODUCTION ........................................................ I. FOUR COMPONENTS ......................... A. ProhibitingHealth Status Discrimination.................... B. The Mandate.. ........................................ C. Subsidies......................... ............ D. Cost-Reducingand Revenue- GeneratingProvisions ....... E. OtherProvisions. ...................................... II. THE ARCHITECTURE OF REFORM A. B. C. D. E. 562 562 565 ....... 567 ....... 569 573 ...................................... 575 Solidarity Insuranceand Community Rating............. ..... 576 Adverse Selection and the Mandate .................. ............. 577 Expenses and Subsidies .................................. 579 Deficits, Taxes, and Spending Cuts.......... .....................- 581 The PhilosophicalCore and PoliticalRobustness......................... 585 III. PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS A. B. C. D. 560 ............................... .......... 585 Solidarity and Insurance Gamesmanship...................... 586 The Mandate: Fines, Premiums, and Civic Duty ..... ........... 588 ExpandedAccess but ProviderExodus ................................ 593 Deficits: A Wink, a Nod, and the Sustainable Growth Rate...................597 CONCLUSION........................................................... 601 J.D. Candidate, Yale Law School; M.D. Candidate, Washington University in St. Louis. I am grateful to many people for assistance in writing and researching, including Courtney Carrell, Benjamin Tseng, Justin Schwab, Shishene Jing, Michael Ellis, Yale Law School's Health Law and Policy Reading Group, Professor George Priest, and especially Julia Malkina and Karis Gong. Many thanks go to the editorial staff of the Yale Law & Policy Review: Liza Khan, Caroline Van Zile, Adam Yoffie, and Julia Lisztwan. Most particularly, I am indebted to Shyam Ravindran and the discussion sparked by his ardent support for the bill. 559 YALE LAW & POLICY REVIEW 29: 559 2011 INTRODUCTION On March 24th, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),' declaring "everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care."' Lauded by the media as "the most expansive social legislation enacted in decades,"3 PPACA, and its companion bill, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 4 2010 (HCERA), known jointly as the Affordable Care Act (ACA),' are tremendously complex pieces of legislation.6 Congress aimed, among other goals, to expand coverage and reduce costs.7 Additionally, the President discussed the need for security and stability in the face of objectionable insurance industry practices: One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it. Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer had more than doubled in size. That is heart-breaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America.' 1. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. No. 111-148, (2010) 124 Stat. 119 [hereinafter PPACA]. 2. Sheryl Gay Stolberg & Robert Pear, Obama Signs Health Care Overhaul Into Law, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 23, 201o, http://www.nytimes.com/2o1o/o3/24/health/policy/ 24health.html. 3. Id. 4. Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, Pub. L. 111-152, 124 Stat. 1029 (2010) [hereinafter HCERA]; see William Branigin, Obama Signs HigherEducation Measure into Law, WASH. POST, Mar. 30, 20o, http:// voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/03/obama-signs-higher-education-m.html. 5. See, e.g., The Affordable Care Act at One Year, DEP'T OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVS., http://www.healthcare.gov/foryou/betterbenefitsbetterhealth/index.html (last visited Mar. 31, 2011). 6. The public law version of PPACA totals 906 pages. See PPACA, Pub. L. 111-152, 124 Stat. 119 (2010). HCERA is an additional 55 pages. See HCERA, 124 Stat. 1029. 7. President Barack Obama, Remarks by the President to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care (Sept. 9, 2009), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press office/remarks-by- the-president- to -a-joint- session -of-congress- on -health-care (arguing that health care had become unaffordable and that too many Americans were uninsured). 8. Id. 560 ADVERSE REACTIONS The above examples illustrate the President's main argument: that the insurance industry currently discriminates against the sick and the unhealthy, using even trivial matters to deny coverage. 9 This is not a new complaint. 0 The President has described the need to regulate insurance companies, who "treat their customers badly-by cherry-picking the healthiest individuals and trying to drop the sickest, by overcharging small businesses who have no leverage, and by jacking up rates."" The President further argued that the reform proposalthe proposal that would eventually evolve into the ACA-could solve these problems by providing security and stability to current policyholders, expanding coverage, and slowing the growth rate of health costs." For its part, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the ACA would reduce federal deficits by $143 billion between 2010 and 2019" while reducing the ranks of the nonelderly uninsured by 32 million, from about 17% to about 6%.14 This Note aims to evaluate the ACA as a means of providing security and stability in insurance, increasing access to health insurance, and reducing medical expenditures. Any in-depth evaluation of the ACA's goals, however, must assess the legislation's provisions and Congress's probable intentions and priorities alongside a policy and economic analysis. Accordingly, this Note proceeds in three Parts. Part I provides a broad review of these highly complex statutes at their full implementation. It focuses on those changes, especially the ban on health status discrimination, that will most dramatically affect insurance coverage, the centerpiece of the legislation.16 Part II argues that the central provision of the ACA is the ban on health status discrimination. In order to make 9. Id. 10. See, e.g., Mary Crossley, DiscriminationAgainst the Unhealthy in Health Insurance, 54 U. KAN. L. REV. 73 (2005). 11. See Obama, supra note 7. 12. Id. 13. Letter from Cong. Budget Office to Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman, U.S. House of Representatives, Providing an Analysis of the Reconciliation Proposal 2 (Mar. 20, available at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11379/AmendReconProp .pdf. Of this, $124 billion would be directly related to he (...truncated)