State Subsidies

This post has a long intro, but please bear with me...

Back in 2018, after the then-Republican controlled Congress zeroed out the ACA's federal "individual mandate penalty" (officially the "shared responsibility penalty"), I posted both a video and slideshow explainer about what this penalty was and why it was included in the ACA in the first place.

The very short and simplified version is this:

A lifetime ago (well, mid-February of this year, anyway), I wrote about New Mexico's Health Care Affordability Fund (HB 278), a bill which easily passed through the state House...only to be inexplicably stopped in its tracks in the state Senate a few days later.

The bill in question wasn't terribly complicated; it essentially just placed a new fee on health insurance carriers to finance a new fund which would in turn be used to reduce healthcare coverage costs for low- and middle-income New Mexicans. Furthermore, since some of the fees would be imposed on managed Medicaid programs which are mostly federally funded, it would have leveraged tens of millions of dollars in federal funding as opposed to all of the fees coming from state residents. Had it gone into effect, HB 278 was expected to generate around $125 million in revenue for the state to use to reduce premiums and cost sharing for enrollees.