This is way inside baseball, but for the true policy wonks in the crowd the Congressional Budget Office has issued a brief on budgetary treatment of health reform proposals.
According to CBO, premiums for a public plan and insurance purchased through a national exchange should be counted as federal revenues if there is an individual mandate and tight government control of the insurance market. They should not if there is no mandate and no public plan or if there is a loosely restrict private market with a mandate.
“The key consideration is whether a proposal would be making health insurance an essentially governmental program, tightly controlled by the federal government with little choice available to those who offer and buy health insurance—or whether the system would provide significant flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private-sector sellers of insurance available to people,” writes CBO director Douglas Elmendorf in a blog post.
Clear now?
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