People with employer-provided health insurance receive a substantial tax saving because this benefit is not taxed as income. By contrast, people who buy their own insurance must do so with after-tax dollars.
There are proposals in both the House and Senate to remedy this inequity through refundable tax credits for those who buy their own health insurance. (A refundable credit is one that is paid regardless of whether the recipient paid that much in taxes.)
Both George W. Bush and Al Gore endorsed the idea during the Presidential campaign, and members of Congress as politically diverse as Democrat Pete Stark and Republican Dick Armey support some version of it. Most of the proposals suggest a credit of about $1,000 for an individual and $2,500 for a family.
Would a refundable tax credit prompt the uninsured to buy a policy?
Two studies released in September 2001 examine the impact refundable tax credits might have on the uninsured who are potential buyers of individual policies. Both use the online insurance broker eHealthInsurance to capture possible premium rates, and both assume a refundable tax credit of $1,000 for an individual policy. Everything else about the two studies differs: the methodology, the authors, the scholarship, and the media hype.
One study is a scholarly work, the other a political tract that contends many of the uninsured would get little or no help. Yet, the inescapable conclusion drawn from both is that a $1,000 refundable tax credit would have a profound effect on lowering the numbers of uninsured in the United States.
The Scholarly Study
“Tax Credits, the Distribution of Subsidized Health Insurance Premiums, and the Uninsured,” a study by economists Mark Pauly and David Song of the University of Pennsylvania and Bradley Herring of Yale University, was published and released without much fanfare by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as Working Paper #8457.
Unlike previous works by the authors and other scholars, the NBER study does not estimate purchasing decisions based on a premium that is the average of all available premiums. Instead, it notes that “no rational purchaser who has obtained price quotes would choose to pay the average or median price. Rather, the buyer would pay the lowest price (or something close to it).”
The authors also reject the idea that premiums can be judged “affordable” or “unaffordable” based solely on the income of the purchaser. The value of the expected benefit must be considered as well. For that reason, people with higher health risks would be more likely to purchase coverage, or pay more for it, than would a low-risk individual with the same income.
The NBER study uses a sample population from the Community Tracking Study, conducted every two years by the Center for Studying Health System Change, to estimate how people would respond to a $1,000 tax credit, given their income, location, sex, age, and smoking behavior. It then compares these populations to the premiums available online for a policy with no more than a $1,000 deductible.
The NBER authors found that premium data were nonexistent or limited in nine states that have adopted community-rating laws requiring that all policyholders be charged the same premium regardless of their health status, and eliminating or compressing age-based premiums.
Still, using one methodology the study found that, with a $1,000 tax credit:
- As many as 85 percent of the uninsured would buy health insurance with a $1,000 deductible, a 20 percent coinsurance requirement, and a $2,000 limit on out-of-pocket spending.
- More than 25 percent of the uninsured could get the policy without paying anything beyond the tax credit.
- Another 25 percent would have to pay no more than $168 a year beyond the tax credit.
Using different assumptions, the study finds that between 50 and 75 percent of the uninsured population could purchase individual coverage for free with a $1,000 tax credit if they chose from the 10 percent of policies with the lowest available premiums. Even the lowest 25 percent of available premiums would be free to at least one-quarter of the uninsured, with half of the uninsured paying no more than $252 a year in addition to the tax credit.
The Political Tract
The other September study was released at a press conference by FamiliesUSA, a liberal advocacy group. Called “A 10-Foot Rope for a 40-Foot Hole,” this report does not identify its authors and is clearly intended as a political document rather than a serious attempt to advance understanding. In fact, every element of the report is chosen for calculated political effect. For instance:
- The study looks only at 25 states, including six of the community-rating states with little or no data.
- It considers only what insurance policy a 25-year-old woman and a 55-year-old woman could obtain.
- Rather than testing what people might actually purchase, it looks only at the most popular plan offered to federal employees—a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan with a $250 deductible and minimal co-payments for doctors’ visits and prescription drugs. It calls anything less generous “substandard.”
The FamiliesUSA report examines what benefits can be purchased for the $1,000 tax credit and how much the premium is for what it describes as a “standard” plan. Among the report’s conclusions:
- “$1,000 plans are not always available for healthy, non-smoking, 25-year-old women.” But it found they could get coverage for $1,000 in all but six states, five of which are community-rating states, where the market is in chaos.
- “$1,000 plans for healthy, non-smoking 25-year-olds in the states where they are available are substandard.” This is another way of saying one can’t buy the federal Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in the individual market for $1,000 a year—hardly surprising, since the federal premium for that plan is $3,142 a year.
- “Standard health insurance plans are not always available for healthy, non-smoking, 25 year-old (or 55-year old) women.” It cites four states, three of them community-rating states, which have very few options left.
What FamiliesUSA actually found is that health insurance is more affordable for younger people than for older people, and that younger people could purchase good coverage for $1,000 per year in almost all the states. This is very useful information, since most of the uninsured are young.
According to the Census Bureau, out of a total uninsured population of 38.7 million, 30.7 million (79 percent) are under 45 years old. This lends credence to the conclusion of the Pauly study, that something approaching 85 percent of the uninsured would be able to purchase coverage with a $1,000 tax credit.
Conclusion
Even though the FamiliesUSA study is intended to demonstrate that the $1,000 tax credit is a bad idea, it actually confirms the credit would enable a large number of currently uninsured people to purchase health insurance with little or no out-of-pocket cost.
The insurance one can buy with a tax credit would not be as generous or as comprehensive as most employer plans, but both studies find it could attract large numbers of those who are now uninsured. The only states where the tax credit apparently would have little impact would be states with community-rating laws.
Greg Scandlen is a senior fellow in health policy with the National Center for Policy Analysis and assistant editor of Health Care News. His email address is [email protected].
For more information . . .
The scholarly study, “Tax Credits, the Distribution of Subsidized Health Insurance Premiums, and the Uninsured,” written by economists Mark Pauly and David Song of the University of Pennsylvania and Bradley Herring of Yale University and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), is available on the Internet at http://www.nber.org/papers/w8457.
The political tract, “A 10-Foot Rope for a 40-Foot Hole,” issued by FamiliesUSA, is available online at: http://www.familiesusa.org.
Greg Scandlen is a policy advisor of The Heartland Institute and founder of Consumers for Health Care Choices, a non-partisan, non-profit membership organization aimed at empowering consumers in the health care system.
