The Wrong Way to Lower Health-Insurance Premiums

For proponents of the American Health Care Act, perhaps the most encouraging nugget in the Congressional Budget Office’s otherwise critical analysis is that insurance premiums could fall by 10 percent on average by 2026. Even this prediction is more mirage than reality, however, in part because of an obscure concept known as “actuarial value.”

As many opponents of the Republicans' Obamacare replacement legislation have already noted, for many people, the decline in premiums would be smaller than the cutback in their subsidies, so they would still end up paying more. And in any case, the predicted fall in premiums partly reflects a troubling rise in the share of older Americans without insurance, a change that would shift the enrollment pool to younger, less expensive beneficiaries.