How Would Hillary Clinton Pay for Her Obamacare “Fix?”
In a recent interview with the Des Moines Register, Hillary Clinton outlined several elements of Obamacare that she said she would seek to change as president. Her proposals illustrate how the fiscal impact of the law could increase significantly from what was expected when the legislation passed in March 2010.
Among the things Mrs. Clinton cited was “how to fix the family glitch.” In short, if an individual qualifies for “affordable” health insurance through an employer, that person’s family will not qualify for federal insurance subsidies–even if the employer does not offer family coverage or if family coverage is unaffordable for the household.
Supporters of the health-care law may call this a “glitch,” but it is far from an unintended consequence. This provision has worked exactly how Congress wrote it into the Affordable Care Act. As I noted in an earlier Think Tank post, the Joint Committee on Taxation outlined the specifics behind this policy in a footnote on Page 33 of a 157-page summary of the law released the week of its passage. While some congressional Democrats have attempted to argue since then that the provision, as codified by the Internal Revenue Service, was “simply incongruent” with the text, or a “wrong interpretation of the law,” the legislative history indicates otherwise. The provision may have harsh consequences for affected families, but its inclusion was deliberate.
When Congress considered the legislation in 2010, the bill needed to adhere to President Barack Obama’s September 2009 pledge that it would “cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” But to keep the total cost of insurance subsidies—the “gross cost of coverage provisions” in Table 4 here—under $1 trillion, lawmakers made numerous tough choices. For instance, Congress delayed the start of subsidized insurance from January 2013 to January 2014. Congress increased Medicaid payment rates to improve access—but let that increase expire after two years. To pay for higher levels of upfront spending on insurance subsidies, Congress included provisions that slow their growth after 2019—a back-dated reckoning that future Congresses, and families, will have to contend with. And Congress passed—whether lawmakers knew it or not—the “family glitch” provision.
As I wrote in January, undoing all these fiscal constraints will cost money. Mrs. Clinton and other supporters of the law have wish lists of enhanced benefits, but proposals to pay for this new spending have been scarce. Moreover, to the extent that skeptics have likened Obamacare to a subprime mortgage—with “teaser” provisions passed in 2010 and a balloon payment still to come—the long lists of additional spending proposals, with few instances of budgetary restraint, will reinforce those comparisons.
This post was originally published at the Wall Street Journal Think Tank blog.