Make money doing the work you believe in
For the purpose of "silver loading", which I know is a point of interest for you, I point out an article in today's Washington post washingtonpost.com/poli…
which references a blog post
of Dr. Brian Blase, who may be the only Republican economic advisor who insists that no part of the expanded subsidies be extended, including thus insisting on a return of the 400% of FPL "subsidy cliff", which is where the humongo premium jumps are.
The rest is just a summary around "silver loading" from a post of mine, not in optimal form for an expert on the issue, but you should be able to extract that Blase, who many of the Republicans may be listening to, wants to restore the CSR funding that Trump took away in 2017. (If I understand it correctly)
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Fans of “silver loading” (I know most readers won’t know what the heck that is, but I know of at least 3 fans) will note:
The proposal has two parts.
"First, Congress would appropriate the ACA’s cost-sharing reduction program. Doing so would provide payments to insurers to reduce plan deductibles, copayments, and out-of-pocket limits. The CSR appropriation—by addressing silver-loading (see brief explanation here)—would reduce silver-plan premiums by about 12 percent and would lower the deficit by roughly $30 billion because subsidies are tied to those premiums.
People not aware of silver loading may still be interested to note that the cost-sharing reduction appropriations (CSR appropriations) were taken away by Trump by executive order in his first term in about 2017, in an attempt to weaken the ACA.
But, most of the states had an actuarial-regulation response called “silver loading” which actually made the ACA better for some people. (That actuarial response, incidentally, which would go away if the Blase recommendation was enacted, is relied on quite heavily in Republican states like Texas and Florida, and without them, the premium jumps we’re now seeing would be higher.)
Another point to make is that, from Blase’s point of view, Trump made a mistake back in 2017 with the removal of the Cost-Sharing-Reduction appropriations. So you would think Dr. Blase might be going to Trump: “dummkopf, dummkopf, dummkopf!!!”, but he is not.