This past Thursday, the Obama administration issued its latest “fix” to the troubled roll out of the Affordable Care Act. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a guidance that permits federal funds to go to insurers and insureds involved in sale of an individual health insurance outside of either a federally established or state-established Exchange. The premise of the guidance is that, in certain states such as Maryland, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Oregon, the complete dysfunctionality of the websites that were intended to determine eligibility for Obamacare subsidies may have led people to enroll in policies off the Exchanges; these purchasers, the guidance directs, should be treated the same as if the state Exchanges had made a timely determination and the individuals had enrolled in an Exchange policy. The guidance implements this concept by retroactively making such individuals eligible for premium tax credits the same as if they had purchased a policy on the Exchange and requires their insurers to readjudicate their claims both retroactively and for the remainder of the policy year as if they were eligible for the same cost sharing reductions that would have applied had they purchased a policy on the Exchange.
The Obama administration’s guidance calling for expenditures of taxpayer money plainly violates the Affordable Care Act. Unlike prior violations incurred in an effort to rescue the ACA from implementation and architectural infirmities, however, this one may actually hurt legal entities in a traceable and individualized fashion. Some off-Exchange insurers may have standing to challenge the violation in court should they have the courage to pursue that option.
The illegality problem
Here’s why the Obama administration’s action is unlawful.
Premium Tax Credits
Under section 1401 of the ACA, which creates new section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code, the government may provide premium tax credits to the individual only for a “coverage month.” The idea was that households with incomes less than 400% of the federal poverty level would ultimately see their federal income taxes reduced to help compensate for the cost of purchasing health insurance. But not any kind of health insurance purchase constitutes a “coverage month.” Under section 36B(c)(2)(A), a coverage month is only one in which the taxpayer “is covered by a qualified health plan … that was enrolled in through an Exchange established by the State under section 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” (emphasis mine) But the policies the Obama administration are now going to subsidize were not enrolled in through an Exchange established by a State (or the federal government); indeed, such is the entire “innovation” of this CMS guidance. And, thus, there is no statutory authorization for the federal government to be giving these taxpayers a credit.
Cost Sharing Reductions
Under section 1402 of the ACA (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 18071), the Secretary requires insurers to offer contracts with reduced cost sharing (deductibles, copays, out-of-pocket limits etc.) to individuals who purchase “Silver” plans. Purchasers are broken down into categories such that purchasers who fall into progressively lower income categories receive progressively more generous reductions. The program effectively converts “Silver” policies into “Silver-Plus”, “Gold Plus” and “Platinum Plus” policies. The government subsidizes insurers issuing these policies so that the cost sharing reductions should not cost them anything (providing the math is done properly). What the Obama administration is proposing is to extend these cost sharing reductions to insurance purchased off the Exchanges, at least where an application had been made to an Exchange.
Again, the problem is that the statute does not authorize cost sharing reductions for all “qualified health plans” sold on or off an Exchange. Under section 1402(a), such payments are authorized only for an “eligible insured.” And the definition of “eligible insured” is quite clear. Section 1402(b)(1) requires that an eligible insured “enroll in a qualified health plan in the silver level of coverage in the individual market offered through an Exchange …” (emphasis mine). Again, that pesky “through an Exchange” language gets in the way of the administration’s goal. The policies now being offered subsidization are precisely those not offered through an Exchange.” The payments to these insurers announced by the Obama administration are illegal. From a financial accountability standpoint, it is not much different than if the Obama administration just decided to give government money to those ineligible for Medicaid simply because it felt badly for some of them.
Why insurers may have standing to challenge the new regulations
The Obama administration has made a habit in its implementation of the Affordable Care Act to exploit the law of “standing.” This is the doctrine that usually denies individuals with generalized grievances about a law or its implementation from bringing suit. Standing usually requires, among other things, that the plaintiff in a legal action have suffered individualized injury from the statute. Thus, when the Obama administration simply declines to collect taxes (as with the refusal to enforce the employer mandate), it becomes challenging to find someone who can use the judicial system to overturn the action. A similar problem plagues efforts to challenge the Obama administration’s decision to permit insurers to continue to sell policies that do not conform to the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. It’s challenging to find an individual or business that is hurt in a particularized and traceable fashion.
With the latest lawless action, however, the Obama administration may have gone too far. Insurers who sold off Exchange will be hurt by the cost sharing reductions. The reason is “moral hazard.” The idea of moral hazard is that the more generous an insurance policy is the greater the frequency with which insureds encounter covered events. In the health insurance arena, people with lower co-pays and deductibles go to the doctor more. Indeed, the major reason for co-pays and deductibles is precisely to induce insureds to be judicious in their use of expensive medical services. Moral hazard is one of the major reasons that platinum policies cost more than bronze ones.
When cost sharing reductions imposed on off-Exchange insurers effectively convert their silver policies into silver-plus, gold-plus and platinum-plus policies, those insurers end up paying more in claims. And, while insurers selling policies on the Exchanges could have taken the induced demand created by cost sharing reductions into account in pricing their policies, there may well be insurers who sold only off the Exchange who, of course, did not take this additional moral hazard into account. Those insurers never dreamed that the government would reduce the amount its insureds would owe in cost sharing. Such insurers should have a strong case for standing in bringing a declaratory judgments to challenge the new guidance or, perhaps, in refusing to honor the demand for cost sharing reductions. Such insurers will, of course, need to be willing to take the political heat that may come from taking on an Executive Branch that more than ever is regulating their products.
A practical problem with imposition of cost sharing reductions on off Exchange policies
There’s also a practical problem with retroactive imposition of cost sharing reductions on off-Exchange insurers. The guidance issued last week does not seem to address it. There are a lot of ways of achieving cost sharing reductions. Some insurers might choose to reduce a deductible for some benefits. Other insurers might choose to reduce a different deductible. Still others might choose to keep the deductible but reduce copays. For this reason, insurers selling policies on the Exchanges needed to specify in advance how they were going to achieve cost sharing reductions for their policies. Hence the government’s “Actuarial Value Calculator.” But insurers selling policies off the Exchange may never have gone through such an exercise. Since CMS is now going to tell these insurers to readjudicate claims once they find out the income level of their insureds, the insurers are somehow going to have to come up, retroactively, with a system of cost sharing reduction. How the insurer chooses to do so will affect how much each insured gets rebated.
The demand for readjudication gives insurers a second basis for standing. Claims adjudication is not free. The insurer is now going to have to go back through claims and resolve them for a second time. Programming computers to adjust claims on a new basis is not costless. Figuring out whether a given service qualifies for cost sharing reductions is not costless. Cutting checks is not costless. And, having an actuary figure out what forms of cost-sharing reductions actually qualify as appropriate under the ACA is hardly costless either. In short, the CMS guidance places new and completely unanticipated burdens on insurers who may have chosen to sell off Exchange precisely to avoid some of the regulatory burden that comes with on-Exchange sales.
The possible abortion problem
The “fix” concocted by the Obama administration may also end up violating restrictions in the ACA on federal funds being used to fund elective abortions. I will admit this is a bit speculative, but here’s the issue. The general problem is that the ACA is an extremely integrated federal statute in which various provisions were enacted on the assumption that the conditions set forth in other provisions would hold. Once the administration starts lawlessly changing certain parts of the ACA, other sections of the act begin to unravel. With abortion, the problem is that section 1303 of the ACA (42 U.S.C. § 18023) prohibits federal tax dollars from being used to pay insurers via advances on premium tax credits to fund elective abortions. Nor may federal funds be used to reduce the amount of “cost sharing” (deductibles, copays) that certain poorer ACA policy purchasers would otherwise pay for services other than elective abortions. There’s an elaborate mechanism specified by the statute involving segregated accounts and allocations that keeps government out of the elective abortion business, almost as if the insured purchased two policies — one for elective abortion and one for everything else — only the latter of which was subsidized by the government. As a result, to the extent that various plans sold on the Exchanges provided for elective abortions — and apparently plans in at least nine states do so — they were structured to avoid receipt of such payments through segregated accounts.
Policies sold off Exchange never anticipated being the recipient of federal taxpayer money via premium tax credits and cost sharing reductions. To the extent they provided for elective abortion coverage — and probably some of them did — there would have been no reason to structure them with segregated accounts to avoid receipt of federal funds for abortion. Thus, when the Obama administration now proposes paying these off-Exchange policies federal tax dollars, the mechanisms for addressing abortion will not exist. I suspect that insurers who chose to sell off Exchange will not be excited by the administrative costs of now establishing segregated accounts. And, of course, if these off-Exchange insurers are not required by the Obama administration to prevent use of federal funds to pay for elective abortions, expect a firestorm of protest from those who believe that the federal government should not be subsidizing elective abortion.
Conclusion
One can be sympathetic to the plight of individuals in states such as Oregon, Maryland and others that wanted subsidized and community rated health insurance and, through no fault of their own, could not get it due to dreadful implementation of database systems that many states managed to accomplish with far fewer problems. In a world of cooperation, it might have been possible for the Executive branch and Congress to work together to hold these individuals harmless for these failings while preserving political and legal accountability for government officials and contractors who collaborated in the various debacles. Instead, however, we have an illegitimate attempt to use the Executive pen to write around the problem and bail out those responsible for embarrassing state implementations of the ACA.
This fix is not only lawless, it is very sloppy. It fails to prescribe a method by which the retroactive cost sharing reductions are to be done. It imposes costs on insurers who may have traded the opportunities of selling on the Exchanges in favor of the comparative regulatory freedom that came with selling off the Exchanges. If the guidance is not clarified, it may enable strategic behavior by those who purchased off the Exchange without suffering through a dysfunctional Exchange first; it may permit those people to apply for Exchange coverage now, reject it, but still obtain retroactive premium tax credits and cost sharing reductions for their off Exchange policies. And the guidance as it stands fails to take into account sensitivities concerning elective abortion funding. And, of course, this spending of taxpayer money appears to be proposed via a “guidance” and not even a full fledged regulation promulgated with at least minimal process.
For proponents of the “flexibility” the Obama administration has shown in implementing the ACA in the face of a hostile Congress, however, the main sloppiness with the latest guidance is that it enables the judicial branch to rule on the pattern of unilateral Executive action that has characterized recent implementation of the ACA. Insurers off the Exchange will be hurt by the cost sharing reductions imposed by the guidance and by the administrative costs it creates. The question is, will any of them have the guts to sue.