HealthLeaders Magazine quoted Manatt’s Joel Ario, a managing director with Manatt Health, for an article about imposing penalties on those who have coverage gaps during the year within the exchanges. The penalties have been proposed as a way of stabilizing the ACA.
"One form could be a permanent penalty like Medicare does now. You just pay more for your coverage. That, however, falls across the people you want in the system, the young and healthy, and the people who are manipulating the system by jumping in and out of coverage," said Ario.
A better type of penalty might be one that exempts a young person who was slow in obtaining coverage after leaving a parent's plan, for instance, but targets those purposefully gaming the system, he explained.
"There are different ways to address it, but the goal is to reward continuous enrollment and penalize people who intentionally create gaps in their service," Ario said.
"That's the kind of thing that we might see proposed after the election. The actuaries say that could be a game changer because it goes at the need to have a more balanced risk pool."
Read the article here.