February 16, 2007

The Gruber report

The governor's office recently released a paper by MIT economist John Gruber explaining how his economic model of California's health care sector works and how he thinks Schwarzenegger's plan would change it. Most of the numbers have already been released elsewhere, but they are all here now, in one place, and in context.

Some highlights:

--The plan would insure 4.1 million of the 4.8 million long-term uninsured in the state under the age of 65. Gruber concludes that the higher number you often see -- 6.5 million -- includes people who were uninsured at some point during 2005 but is more than the number who are uninsured at any given time.

--The other 700,000 are adult illegal immigrants. They would not be covered by the governor's plan but would be eligible for services from the counties.

--The number of people insured by their employers would remain at 18.8 million. Within that number, 800,000 would gain employer-based coverage, while 300,000 people would lose it and go into a public program and 500,000 would leave it voluntarily to buy coverage from the new public pool, taking their employer contribution with them.

--1.5 million people would be added to the public insurance rolls, including 900,000 children from families making less than 300 percent of poverty, 250,000 adults who are already eligible, and 400,000 adults who would be newly eligible. This would cost an additional $2.4 billion a year.

--About 1.9 million people would join the state-run insurance pool. The pool's costs are estimated at $224 per member per month, for a total of $5.1 billion. Of that, the government would pay $2.4 billion, individuals with that insurance would pay $1.4 billion and employers would pay $1.3 billion. Only about 7.5 percent of employers representing 5.7 percent of workers would pay the payroll tax.

--About 700,000 more people -- up from 2 million today -- would get private insurance not purchased by their employer.

Posted by dweintraub on February 16, 2007 3:03 PM