VTDigger
Posted By Andrew Stein On April 13, 2013 @ 3:40 am In Recent | 7 Comments

/></p> <p>The above graph represents the shift in what families earning 186 percent of the 2013 federal poverty line would pay for adult health insurance premiums under the Vermont House proposal for state aid and the Affordable Care Act.<br />Lawmakers have repeatedly said that when Vermont’s new health insurance marketplace — Vermont Health Connect [2] — goes into effect, there will be winners and there will be losers.</p> <p>When the state’s subsidized insurance programs, Catamount and VHAP, end in 2014, some low-income Vermonters will see their health insurance premiums drop and others will see rates increase. To cushion the cost hikes that these Vermonters would otherwise run into under the Affordable Care Act, the Vermont House passed a new subsidy program.</p> <p>But due to the way the federal system subsidizes health insurance – and the fact that Vermont lawmakers have built the state system from this model – the House proposal would deal one population substantially steeper premiums than they pay now.</p> <p>That demographic? Single parents, earning roughly $25,000 a year or more, who are losing their Catamount coverage.</p> <p>Sarah Robinson, a health policy analyst at Voices for Vermont’s Children, said that these increases could cause many struggling parents to forgo health insurance, which, in turn, would affect their children.</p> <p>“There is research indicating that even when children have access to care, their well-being is impacted when their parent’s ability to access affordable care changes,” she said, pointing to federal government and Urban Institute studies that link parental insurance enrollment and access to care with their children [3].</p> <p>How the House proposal hurts single parents<br />The Vermont House Health Care Committee, which voted to recommend the subsidy [4], used a similar calculation to the one that Gov. Peter Shumlin and his administration recommended at the outset of the session [5].</p> <p>The calculation is tied to federal subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, which follow a linear curve, rather than the step increases that are applied to the Catamount and VHAP programs (see the figure below, for an example).[6]</p> <p><img decoding=

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