On September 5, 2024, Paragon’s latest paper “It’s Not Just the Prices,” by Daniel Cruz and Greg Fann, was referenced in Benefits Pro.
From the article:
Individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements, or ICHRAs, could help fix quality problems in the individual major medical insurance market.
Daniel Cruz and Greg Fann, actuaries at Axene Health Partners, make that prediction in a paper distributed by Paragon Health Institute. Paragon is a think tank, or independent research center, that describes itself as non-partisan but that has had close ties to the Republican Party. The ICHRA is a relatively new kind of health account. An employer can use it to give workers cash they can use to buy their own health coverage. Cruz and Fann see an important obstacle to ICHRA expansion: The individual health insurance policies available in many markets are terrible.
Today, most U.S. residents with individual health insurance use Affordable Care Act premium tax credits to buy coverage through ACA public exchange programs. The ACA subsidy structure encourages consumers to buy the cheapest possible coverage, without thinking about the provider networks or other quality indicators, according to Cruz and Fann. “The percentage of individual market consumers enrolled in plans with broad provider networks declined from 36% to 11% between 2014 and 2023,” the actuaries write.
