Monday, March 13, 2017
Commonwealth Fund Explains Why the House Repeal Bill Is Unlikely to Stabilize Insurance Markets
Congress established the Medicare Part D program in 2003, creating for the first time a freestanding outpatient prescription drug insurance product, something the private sector had never offered before.
To ensure this product’s viability, Congress enacted stabilizing measures—a generous reinsurance program to cover high-cost cases, a risk corridor program to share risks with insurers, a risk adjustment program to compensate insurers for the riskiness of the population they covered, and a fallback program for the federal government to assume the risk of providing coverage for service areas where no private carriers stepped forward...