What the Senate Bill Means for Your Health-Insurance Premiums

The CBO is out this afternoon with its latest round of estimates — this time, on what the Senate health-care bill would mean for health-insurance premiums. The short answer: Not much, for most working people.

The long answer is more complicated, so we’ll break it down into the three categories the CBO uses. The estimates compare premiums in 2016 under the Senate bill versus premiums in 2016 under current law.

Premiums for people who get health insurance through a large group (including companies with more than 50 people) would be unchanged, or maybe a little lower, under the Senate bill. People in this category account for 70% of the nonelderly population CBO looked at.

Premiums for people who get insurance through a small group would also be largely unchanged. But a small percentage of people who get insurance through a small group would be eligible for insurance subsidies, and those people would see their rates fall by about 10%.

Premiums for people who buy health insurance on the individual market would go up by 10% or more. But the majority of people in this category would be eligible for subsidies, and those people would wind up paying nearly 60% less, on average, under the Senate bill, because of the effect of the subsidies.

For more details on these numbers, see the table on page 5 of the CBO’s estimate. The subsidies are based on income, and explained in detail in Table 2 on the last page of the estimate.

As always, these sorts of estimates — both for what premiums would be under current law, and for what they’d be under the senate health bill — are subject to plenty of uncertainty, so take them with a grain of salt. But you already knew that.

Kellogg: Rice Krispies Won’t Protect Your Kid From Swine Flu

Kellogg said it’s removing the great big banner on the front of Rice Krispies boxes that says the cereal “helps support your child’s immunity.”

The move seems a bit odd, that it was only July when the company rolled out the new claim, which went along with a new formulation of the cereal that included higher amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E. In a brief statement announcing the end of the immunity banner, Kellogg said:

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change.

The statement doesn’t mention that, just last week, the San Francisco city attorney wrote the company a letter asking for a substantiation of the immunity claim (and also citing the H1N1 flu pandemic). The letter said, in part:

I am concerned that the prominent use of the Immunity Claims to advertise a sugar-laden, chocolate cereal like Cocoa Krispies may mislead and deceive parents of young children. … At a time when parents are increasingly worried about the spread of the H1N1 virus (”swine flu”), it is vitally important that parents receive accurate information about what they can do to protect their children’s health.

There’s a broader story at work here: Tension between food companies putting more health claims on the front of their packages, and governments looking to validate those claims. Several big food companies recently suspended their “Smart Choice” labeling program, after the FDA said it was working on new rules for front-of-package labeling. And the EU’s food agency recently released opinions on hundreds of health claims made by food manufacturers.