Report using Connecticut Healthcare Affordability Index (CHAI) released
A new report was released this week that utilized the groundbreaking Connecticut Healthcare Affordability Index (CHAI) tool to analyze the effects of recent health care legislation.
The report titled Connecticut Healthcare Affordability Index: Findings from the CHAI Interactive Tool, reveals approximately 8,500 additional Connecticut households would be able to
afford their basic needs, if policy changes to increase the affordability of healthcare are implemented.
The Office of Health Strategy (OHS) and the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) released the Connecticut Healthcare Affordability Index (CHAI), in June 2021, an interactive living tool used to measure the impact of various policy models on Connecticut families’ ability to make ends meet.
The new findings in the report measured impacts of the cost of basic needs, income inadequacy rates, and affordable healthcare rates by using the following policy models: American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Premium Tax Credit, Covered Connecticut, and the Cost Growth Benchmark.
The ARPA Premium Tax Credit (PTC), a refundable tax credit designed to help eligible individuals and families pay for qualified health plans, purchased through the federal or state exchanges. The CHAI measured the impact of the lack of the ARPA PTC and concluded that the cost of health insurance for households in the individual marketplace can be significant burden on basic needs.
By removing the premium tax credit income cap for individuals and families purchasing insurance through the individual insurance marketplaces results in a 5.9 percentage point decrease of income inadequacy rates—a decrease of over 7,500 households estimated to have income insufficient to meet their basic needs.
Overall, this model estimates that if the temporary ARPA provision was available in 2019, nearly 31,000 additional households would be defined as having affordable healthcare.
The Covered Connecticut Program was established on July 1, 2021, an initiative to provide Connecticut residents with health insurance coverage at no cost.
The Covered CT model estimated over 17,000 additional households will be defined as having affordable healthcare costs as a result of the expanded eligibility of the Covered Connecticut program.
By tying the rate of hospital spending growth to the cost growth benchmark, the model estimates that 14,000 additional households will attain affordable healthcare according to the Connecticut Household Healthcare Spending Target. Further analyses will be performed, including tying the rate of pharmaceutical and overall health care spending to the rate of the annual cost growth benchmark. These analyses will likely substantially increase the number of households with affordable healthcare. Testing further additional proposed actions will allow policymakers to predict the direct impact of their proposals on affordability.
Additional budget items passed this session, such as the child tax credit, will be factored into further analyses.
OHS and OSC worked with researchers from the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington School of Social Work to develop this tool and prepared the report.
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