What if the American Rescue Plan’s enhanced marketplace subsidies were made permanent?: estimates for 2022
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Author(s):
- Banthin, Jessica, author Buettgens, Matthew, author Simpson, Michael, author Wang, Robin, author
- Contributor(s):
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, issuing body. Urban Institute, issuing body.
- Publication:
- [Washington, DC] : Urban Institute, April 2021
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- COVID-19 -- economics Public Assistance -- economics Unemployment -- statistics & numerical data United States United States.
- Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- The recently enacted American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) includes several provisions designed to expand access to affordable health insurance coverage in 2021 and 2022, while the economy continues recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and recession. One provision is the expansion of Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace subsidies over that period, which can improve health insurance affordability for people whose incomes have fallen due to reduced employment opportunities during the pandemic. Expanding these subsidies could substantially reduce household spending on health care, reduce the number of people uninsured, and increase marketplace enrollment, but the new subsidies’ effects may be limited by their brief availability. In this paper, we seek to show the maximum potential impact of the ARPA’s enhanced marketplace subsidies on health insurance coverage and set the stage for next steps by policymakers. To do so, we show the enhanced subsidies’ effects on coverage as if they were permanent changes (instead of limited to 2021 and 2022), and we assume people, employers, and insurers have fully responded to the new subsidies. Because of our approach, our estimates differ from those by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Adhering to their mandate, the CBO estimated the ARPA as written, including the temporary nature of changes to marketplace subsidies. Given that a permanent change in subsidies would be expected to have a larger effect than one that is temporary, our estimate of the reduction in the number of people uninsured is more than three times as large as the CBO’s. If the ARPA’s temporary enhancements to marketplace subsidies were made permanent and consumers, employers, and insurers had fully adjusted to the new coverage options, we find that in 2022: (1) 4.2 million fewer people would be uninsured; (2) 5.1 million more people would enroll in the subsidized marketplace; and (3) Nongroup premiums would be 15 percent lower.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-DC license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (8 pages))
- NLM Unique ID:
- 9918316886706676 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9918316886706676