Tag Archives: Michael Tanner

Deconstructing the Health Care Administrative State

14 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in Health Care, Obamacare

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A leftist friend chided me early this year for my foolish optimism about repeal and replacement of Obamacare. I have to give her credit. She said the GOP did not have a viable plan — I’m sure she meant that both as a matter of policy and politics. I pointed to the several “plans” that were extant at the time, and even some that I thought might soon be formalized as legislation. I wrote off her skepticism as a failure on her part to understand an approach to health care policy less statist than the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Like so many on the left, she probably has trouble conceiving of any plan not relying on centralized control. Apparently, quite a few Republicans share that blind spot. Nevertheless, I was certainly naive about the prospects of getting anything through Congress quickly.

But the battle is not lost, even now. It should be obvious to everyone, as Michael Tanner notes, that the health care debate is far from over. The individual insurance market is in bad shape, reeling from the unfavorable balance of risks created by community rating, mandated coverage and guaranteed issue. As Robert Laszewski notes, the attrition in the individual market is dominated by individuals not eligible for Obamacare subsidies. While legislation is a much longer shot than I imagined back in January, there remain a variety of ways in which Obamacare’s most deleterious provisions can be neutralized and replaced to create a more market-oriented environment. And though it’s too bad that it might come to this, as the situation continues to devolve, new legislation might gain viability.

Tanner mentions a variety of administrative decisions sitting squarely in the hands of the Trump Administration: insurance company subsidies? congressional exemption from Obamacare? promotion of open enrollment? enforcing the individual mandate? And there are many others. Tim Huelskamp provides a link to The Heartland Institute‘s “complete healthcare reform toolbox“. He says:

“During congressional testimony in March, my former House colleague and HHS Secretary Tom Price pointed out that the law offers him multiple opportunities to do just that: ‘Fourteen hundred and forty-two times … the secretary ‘shall’ or the secretary ‘may” make changes to the Affordable Care Act. The Price is right! Under Obamacare, he has tremendous power and latitude not only to dismantle the ACA but to replace it with health care options that enhance individual freedom.

Let Americans pick their doctors, choose a ‘skinny’ health insurance plan, or even purchase a plan from a company based in another state. The Trump administration can waive penalties on individuals and businesses who simply can’t afford Obama’s mandates.  HHS can give a green light to any state that wants to begin restoring choice and freedom for their citizens without federal bureaucrat interference.“

Another productive avenue is deregulation of health care providers themselves. One of the worst aspects of the ACA is its reliance on so-called Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which were intended to encourage greater cooperation and efficiency among providers. The reality is that the ACO rules imposed by HHS are leading to higher costs, greater financial risk and increased concentration in the provision of medical care. Patients, also, are often penalized by the monopolizing effects, and because they might not be able to continue seeing the doctor of their choice under the limits of the health plans available. Moreover, the ACA infringes upon the doctor-patient relationship by restricting the doctor’s authority and the patient’s choices about tests and treatments that can be provided. Many of these rules and restrictions can be undone by administrative action.

Finally, before we completely dismiss the possibility of a legislative solution, there is a new Republican health care bill to consider in the Senate. However, it is just as limited in its reforms, or more, than the bill that passed in the House and the one that failed in the Senate. It’s unlikely to go anywhere soon. There could be later opportunities to consider various pieces of reform legislation, especially if the Trump Administration makes good on its promises to roll back administrative rules put in place to implement the ACA. Sadly, for now we wait in vain for legislators and President Trump to overcome the intellectual failure at the root of the inaction on ending Obamacare. The lesson is that in human affairs, central planning doesn’t work!

Cleaving the Health Care Knot… Or Not

18 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Health Care, Obamacare

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Republican leadership has succeeded in making their health care reform plans in 2017 even more confusing than the ill-fated reforms enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2010. A three-phase process has been outlined by Republican leaders in both houses after the initial rollout of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), now billed as “Phase 1”. The AHCA was greeted with little enthusiasm by the GOP faithful, however.

As a strictly political matter, there is a certain logic to the intent of “three-phase plan”: limiting the provisions of the AHCA to issues having an impact on the federal budget. That would allow the bill to be addressed under “budget reconciliation” rules requiring only 51 votes for passage in the Senate. Phase 2 would involve regulatory rule-making, or rule-rescinding, as the case may be. The putative Phase 3 would require additional legislation to address such unfinished business as allowing health insurance competition across state lines, eliminating anti-trust protection for insurers, and medical tort reform. How the sponsors will get 60 Senate votes for Phase 3 reforms is an unanswered question.

Legislative Priorities

Yuval Levin wrote a great analysis of the AHCA last week In which he described the structure of the House bill as a paranoid reaction to the demands of an “imaginary parliamentarian”. By that he means that the reforms in the bill conform to a rigid and potentially flawed interpretation of Senate budget reconciliation rules. Levin’s view is that the House should not twist itself up over what might be negotiated prior to a Senate vote. In other words, the House should concern itself at this stage with passing a bill that at least makes sense as reform, without bowing to any of the awful legacy provisions in Obamacare.

Medicaid reform is one piece of the proposed legislation and is reasonably straightforward. It imposes caps on federal funding to states after 2020, but it grants more flexibility to the states in managing the program. It also involves a tradeoff by allowing Medicaid funding to increase over the first few years, in line with the expansion under Obamacare, in exchange for capped growth later. The expectation is that long-term costs of the program will be reduced through a combination of the caps and better management at the state level.

The more complex aspects of the AHCA attempt to effect changes in the individual market. Levin offers a good perspective on these measures. First, he describes the general character of earlier Republican reform proposals from which the AHCA descends:

“Those various proposals all involved bringing premium costs down by enabling insurers to sell catastrophic coverage plans (along with more comprehensive plans) and enabling everyone in the individual market to afford at least those catastrophic coverage plans. This would enable far greater competition and let anyone not otherwise covered by insurance enter the individual market as a consumer.  …

The House proposal bears a clear resemblance to this approach. It involves some deregulation from Obamacare, it includes a refundable tax credit for coverage, it gestures toward incentives for continuous coverage. But it is also fundamentally different from this approach, because it functions within the core insurance rules established by Obamacare, which means it can’t really achieve most of the key aims of the conservative reforms it is modeled on.”

The rules established by Obamacare to which Levin refers include the form of community rating, which is merely loosened somewhat by the AHCA. However, the AHCA would impose a 30% penalty for those who fail to enroll while still healthy. This is a poorly designed incentive meant to substitute for Obamacare’s individual mandate, and it is likely to backfire. Levin is clear that this feature could have been avoided by scrapping the old rules and introducing a new form of community rating available only to the continuously insured.

The AHCA also fails to cap the tax benefits of employer-provided coverage, which retains a potential imbalance between the incentives for employer versus individual coverage. Levin believes, however, that some of these shortcomings can be fixed through a negotiation process in either the House or the Senate, if and when the bill goes there.

The CBO’s Report

As it is, the bill was “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) with results that are widely viewed as unsatisfactory. The CBO’s report states that the AHCA would reduce the federal budget deficit, but the ugly headline is that relative to Obamacare, it woud cause 24 million people to lose their coverage by 2024. That number is drastically inflated, as Avik Roy demonstrated in his Forbes column this week. Here are the issues laid out by Roy:

  1. The CBO has repeatedly erred by a large margin in its forecasts of Obamacare exchange enrollment, overestimating 2016 enrollment by over 100% as recently as 2014.
  2. The AHCA changes relative to Obamacare are taken from CBO’s 2016 forecast, which still appears to over-predict Obamacare enrollment substantially. Roy estimates that this difference alone would shave at least 7 million off the 24 million loss of coverage quoted by the CBO.
  3. The CBO also assumes that all states will opt to participate in expanded Medicaid going forward. That is highly unlikely, and it inflates CBO’s estimate of the AHCA’s negative impact on coverage by another 3 million individuals, according to Roy.
  4. Going forward, the CBO expects the Obamacare individual mandate to encourage millions more to opt for insurance than would under the AHCA. Roy estimates that this assumptions adds as much as 9 million to the CBO’s estimate of lost coverage across the individual and employer markets, as well as Medicaid.

Thus, Roy believes the CBO’s estimate of lost coverage for 24 million individuals is too high by about 19 million! And remember, these hypothetical losses are voluntary to the extent that individuals refuse to avail themselves of AHCA tax credits to purchase catastrophic coverage, or to enroll in Medicaid. The latter will be no less generous under the AHCA than it is today. The tax credits are refundable, which means that you qualify regardless of your pre-credit tax liability.

Fixes

Despite Roy’s initial skepticism about the AHCA, he thinks it can be fixed, in part by means-testing the tax credits, rather than the flat credit in the bill. He also believes the transition away from the individual mandate should be more gradual, allowing more time for markets to being premiums down, but I find this position rather puzzling given Roy’s skepticism that the mandate has a strong impact on enrollment. Perhaps gradualism would convince the CBO to score the bill more favorably, but that’s a bad reason to make such a change.

It’s impossible to say how the bill will evolve, but certainly improvements can be made. It is also impossible to know whether Phases 2 and 3 will ultimately bring a more complete set of cost-reducing regulatory and competitive reforms. Phase 3, of course, is a political wild card.

Michael Tanner notes a few other advantages to the AHCA. Even the CBO says the cost of health insurance would fall, and the AHCA will bring greater choice to the individual market. It also promises over $1 trillion in tax cuts and lower federal deficits.

Alternatives

The GOP faced alternatives that should have received more consideration, but those alternatives might not be politically viable at this point. Some of them contain features that might be negotiated into the final legislation. Rand Paul’s plan has not attracted many advocates. Paul took the courageous position that there should be no entitlements in a reform plan (i.e., subsidies); instead, he insisted, with liberalized market forces, premium costs would decline sufficiently to allow affordable coverage to be purchased by a broad cross-section of Americans. Paul is obviously unhappy about the widespread support in the GOP for refundable tax credits as a replacement for existing Obamacare subsidies.

John C. Goodman has advocated a much simpler solution: take every federal penny now dedicated to health care and insurance subsidies, including every penny of taxes now avoided via tax deductions on employer-provided coverage, and pay it out to households as a tax credit contingent on the purchase of health insurance or health care expenses. This is essentially the plan put forward by Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. Bill Cassidy in the Patient Freedom Act, described here. While I admire the simplicity of one program to replace the existing complexities in the federal funding of health care coverage, my objection is that a health care “dividend” of this nature resembles the flat tax credit in the AHCA. Neither is means-tested, amounting to a “Universal Basic Health Insurance Benefit”. Regular readers will recall my recent criticism of the Universal Basic Income, which is the sort of program that smacks of “universal state dependency”. But let’s face it: we’re already in a state of federal health care dependency. In this case, there is no incremental cost to taxpayers because the credit would replace existing outlays and tax expenditures. In that sense, it would eliminate many of the distortions currently embedded in federal health care policy.

A more drastic approach, at this point, is to simply repeal Obamacare, perhaps with a lengthy phase-out, and attempt to replace it later in the hope that support will coalesce around a reasonable set of measures leveraging market forces, and with accommodations for high-risk individuals and the economically disadvantaged. Michael Cannon writes that CBO estimated a simple repeal would increase the number of uninsured by 23 million over ten years, slightly less than the 24 million estimate for the AHCA! Of course, neither of these estimates is likely to be remotely accurate, as both are distorted by the CBO’s rosy assumptions about the future of Obamacare.

Where To Go?

Tanner reminds us that the real alternative to Republican legislation, whatever form it might take, is not a health care utopia. It is Obamacare, and it is collapsing. That plan cannot be effectively reformed with additional subsidies for insurers and consumers, or we’d find ourselves in a continuing premium spiral. The needed reforms to Obamacare would resemble changes contemplated in some of the GOP proposals. While I cannot endorse that AHCA legislation in its current form, or as a standalone reform, I believe it can be improved, and the later phases of reform we are told to anticipate might ultimately vindicate the approach taken by GOP leadership. I am most skeptical about the promise of subsequent legislation in Phase 3. I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed that by then, the path to additional reforms will be more attractive to democrats.

Mobility, Safety Nets & Sticky Webs

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Big Government, Welfare State

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We’re unlikely to reduce the share of the U.S. population living in economic dependency under the current policy regime. So many aspects of tax law, regulation and aid programs are designed as if to perpetuate or perhaps even worsen the situation. I’ve discussed this topic before on Sacred Cow Chips in “Degrees of Poverty and the Social Safety Trap“, and “Minority Politics and the Redistributionist Honey Trap“.

Many supporters of aggressive anti-poverty efforts take umbrage at any suggestion that government aid might discourage the poor from engaging in productive activities. They imagine an implication that the poor are “lazy”, perfidious or otherwise undeserving of assistance. Whether that is a misunderstanding or merely rhetorical bite-back, the fact is that it is rational to respond to incentives and there is no shame in doing so. Unfortunately, many assistance programs contain incentive traps or income “cliffs” that discourage work effort. This applies to food stamps, rent subsidies, Obamacare subsidies, and many more of the 120+ federal aid programs and other state and local programs.

Here’s a new example from a research abstract posted at Marginal Revolution: The Medicaid expansion had very negative effects on labor force participation. The funding for Medicaid expansion at the state level was authorized by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — aka Obamacare, but only about half the states went along with it. From the abstract:

“I find a significant negative relationship between Medicaid expansion and labor force participation, in which expanding Medicaid is associated with 1.5 to 3 percentage point drop in labor force participation.“

The direction of impact is hardly unique, and as Tyler Cowen notes at the link:

“Work is good for most people, and it is even better for their future selves, and their future children too.“

The negative impact of Obamacare is more massive than the estimate above might suggest. Veronique de Rugy at Reason.com discusses how “Federal Programs Keep People Poor“. While most of her article is about the negative impact of high marginal tax rates on the employment prospects of the poor, she also recalls an ugly CBO estimate of the ACA’s impact:

“In 2014, the Congressional Budget Office—Congress’ official fiscal scorekeeper—revised its original estimate to report that because of the law, by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work will have exited the labor force.“

There are several different channels through which the negative effects of the ACA operate: Small employers are incented to limit their hiring and the hours of employees, and federal subsidies (and sometimes state benefits) are available to individuals only so long as they remain below certain income thresholds. Again, this is typical of many government aid programs (the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) being an exception). More from de Rugy:

“When the government takes away a person’s benefits as his income goes up, it has the same effect as a direct tax. And remember, when you tax something, you usually get less of it. That means these programs can actually hinder income mobility: In order to continue receiving their government cash, individuals are forced to limit the amount they earn. Thus, they have an incentive not to try to climb the income ladder by putting in extra hours or signing up for job training and educational programs.“

Mises Wire recently carried a reprint of an essay by the great Henry Hazlitt, “How To Cure Poverty“. The gist of Hazlitt’s argument is that government largess simply cannot create wealth for society, but only diminish it. The mere process of redistributing the current “pie” consumes resources, but that is minor compared to the future reduction in the size of the pie brought on by the terrible incentives inherent in income taxation and many government benefit programs:

“The problem of curing poverty is difficult and two-sided. It is to mitigate the penalties of misfortune and failure without undermining the incentives to effort and success. … The way to cure poverty is … through … the adoption of a system of private property, freer trade, free markets, and free enterprise. It was largely because we adopted this system more fully than any other country that we became the most productive and hence the richest nation on the face of the globe. Through this system more has been done to wipe out poverty in the last two centuries than in all previous history.“

Harvard professors Edward Glaeser and Andrei Schleifer have written about “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate“, which posits that redistributive policies that are harmful to constituents can be rewarding to politicians. The paper deals with policies that encourage emigration of affluent voters away from cities, but which nevertheless reward politicians by increasing the proportion of their political base in the remaining constituency. It seems to apply very well to many major cities in the U.S. However, it certainly applies more broadly, across states and nations, when affluent people and their capital are mobile while the less affluent are not, especially when benefits are at stake. It’s no secret that promises of benefits are often attractive to voters in the short run, even if they are harmful and unsustainable in the long run.

The welfare state appears to have helped to sustain many of the poor at an improved standard of living after accounting for benefits, or it has prevented them from falling into “deep poverty”. However, it hasn’t succeeded in lifting the poor out of dependency on the state. Pre-benefit poverty rates are about the same as they were the late 1960s. In addition, Christopher Jencks observes that the “Very Poor” have in fact become poorer. That’s discussed in his review of “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer. Jencks presents statistics showing that those in the lowest two percentiles of the income distribution have suffered a fairly sharp decline in income since 1999. Many of these extremely poor individuals do not avail themselves of benefits for which they could qualify. In addition, the EITC requires earned income. A job loss is a wage loss and, if it goes on, a loss of EITC benefits. Unfortunately, work requirements are more difficult to meet in the presence of wage floors and other distortions imposed by heavy-handed regulation.

A guaranteed national income has become a hot topic recently. Michael Tanner weighs in on “The Pros and Cons…” of such a program. There are many things to like about the idea inasmuch as it could sweep away many of the wasteful programs piled upon each other over the years. It is possible to construct a sliding-scale guarantee that would retain positive incentives for all, as Milton Friedman demonstrated years ago with his negative income tax concept. However, as Tanner points out, there are many details to work out, and the benefits of the switch would depend upon the incentive structure built into the guarantee. As a political plaything, it could still be dangerous to the health of the economy and an impediment to income mobility. Don Boudreaux has registered objections to a guaranteed income, one of which is based on strengthening the wrongheaded argument that we derive all rights from government. Even more interesting is David Henderson’s take on a basic income guarantee. He finds that the budgetary impact of a $10,000 guarantee would equate to a 30% increase in government spending, and that assumes that it replaces all other assistance programs! Henderson also discusses the public choice aspects of income guarantees, as well as moral objections, and he concludes that there are strong reasons to reject the idea on libertarian grounds.

The economy is riddled with too many subsidies, penalties and bad incentives that distort the behavior of various groups. The well-to-do often benefit from subsidies that are every bit as distortionary as those inherent in many public assistance programs. They should all be swept away to restore a dynamic economy with the potential to lift even more out of poverty. There could be a role for a guaranteed income on the grounds that it is better than what we’ve got. But we should recall the words of Hazlitt, who reminded us that we’ve come so far on the strength of property rights, private initiative, and free trade. Left unfettered, those things can take us much farther than the ugly pairing of beneficence and coercion of the government behemoth.

 

ObumbleCare & The Adverse Selectors

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Obamacare

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Risk Pool

“… out in the real world, the bad news keeps coming, drop by drop, drip by drip, until we are seeing a virtual flood of Obamacare awfulness.“

That’s from Michael D. Tanner in “What’s Wrong With Obamacare?” Tonight, I offer  you a list of some of the drippings:

  • Flat enrollment, expected to be less than half of the original projection for 2016;
  • Almost all (97%) newly insureds under Obamacare are enrolled under expanded Medicaid, unaided by the many complexities introduced by Obamacare;
  • 12 of 23 federal health care insurance coops have failed as of Nov. 3;
  • High medical loss ratios are threatening the viability of insurers in 27 states, a result of adverse selection by relatively sick enrollees;
  • With unfavorable risk pools, premiums for all 2016 exchange-based plans are rising 20.3%, well above the 7.5% figure quoted by HHS for “Silver” plans;
  • Health insurance does not guarantee health care, and many of the newly insured are finding that providers are scarce, given reimbursement rates;
  • Emergency rooms utilization is up, as patients know they can get care there;
  • Rationing of care is increasingly a matter of waiting time, as it is in other countries that rely on non-market solutions to health care;
  • As many as 700,000 low-income enrollees are at risk of losing their coverage because they did not file tax returns;
  • For many, the penalty for not having coverage ($695 next year) is lower than the premium they would pay for coverage;
  • More than 5 million individuals lost their coverage under Obamacare, generally policies that were preferred over the new alternatives;
  • Poor incentives and burdensome provider requirements are pushing costs up.
  • Employers are attempting to minimize the cost of Obamacare. The law makes hiring more expensive and leads to substitution of part-time for full-time workers;

The “death spiral” might not be far-off for Obamacare. Here is Tanner’s assessment:

“The young and healthy simply haven’t signed up for Obamacare in the same numbers as those who are older and sicker. The only way for insurers to offset their skyrocketing [Medical Loss Ratios] is to hike premiums still further. … premiums in the worst states could have to rise by an average of 34 percent, and possibly as much as 52 percent. But premium hikes of that magnitude would almost certainly further discourage younger and healthier Americans from buying insurance.“

There is no question that Obamacare will have to be replaced or changed substantially.  Unfortunately, Obamacare apologists simply can’t come to grips with the reality of the law’s failure. They would do well to start focusing on new solutions to the problems that Obamacare was intended to solve. To that end, the Mercatus Center commissioned a collection of seven essays on how best to deal with the problem of pre-existing conditions, now published on the Mercatus web site. Market-based solutions are needed to encourage competition among insurers, incentivize innovation and cost control, and reestablish the primacy of the patient-provider relationship.

Reform Not? Play Social Security Slots

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Social Security

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social-security slot

Social Security does not provide future retirees with a safe “return” on taxes paid into the system on their behalf, given the program’s funding problems. It’s not even clear that it provides a decent return to many current retirees, and it will get worse as younger age cohorts become eligible. Demographic changes worked in the system’s favor in its early years, but no more: the number of eligible retirees is growing faster than the working-age population. This has led to cash flow deficits since 2010 that will widen in the years ahead. The unfunded liabilities of the system are currently estimated to be $26 trillion. The so-called “Trust Fund” for retirement holds about about $2.8 trillion of government securities, but those can’t be “cashed out” without a raid on general tax revenue or new borrowing by the Treasury.

Michael Tanner reveals the absurdity of some of the myths surrounding SS, such as claims that there is “no crisis” (and even more absurdly, that benefits should be expanded), that the Trust Fund will “save” the system, and that SS payroll taxes are “saved” for retirees. They are not saved; it is a “pay-as-you-go” system with current payroll tax collections paid out to today’s retirees. Here is Tanner on the woeful state of the system’s finances:

“According to projections by the Congressional Budget Office, for workers born in the 1980s, there are only enough funds to pay 76 percent of their schedule benefits; for today’s children born in the 2000s, this falls to 69 percent. And, taxes are already so high relative to benefits that young people will receive far less than they could receive if they invested their taxes privately.“

Measuring the return on Social Security (SS) payroll taxes (otherwise known as FICA) is not without controversy. The Social Security Administration (SSA) performs its own analyses of the returns on payroll taxes periodically. They analyze individuals at different income levels for each of four circumstances: single men, single women, one-earner couples and two-earner couples. They do so under different scenarios about future payroll taxes and benefits. The benefits include cost-of-living adjustments. These calculations show that today’s younger workers, singles and high-income workers can expect to receive the lowest returns. According to the most recent report, from December 2014, annual rates of return for those not yet drawing benefits under present law varies from less than 1% to 6.5%. Of course, the promised benefits are not sustainable under present law.

Reforms are not optional, as the program cannot run a deficit under its current authority once the Trust Fund is exhausted. SSA attempts to analyze steps that might close the gap and the impact of those changes on returns to retirees. One scenario involves higher payroll taxes and another lower benefits. These changes reduce the calculated returns in all cases, though even the lowest returns remain positive, if barely. These alternative scenarios involve no changes until 2033, however.

At the time of the SSA report, the most recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted that the SS Trust Fund would be exhausted in 2033. More recently, the CBO predicted that the fund will run dry in 2029. (The Disability Trust Fund is projected to run dry in 2017.) Therefore, the returns calculated by SSA under the alternative scenarios are over-estimates, since more drastic and earlier measures are required to restore balance. It’s likely that some of those returns would turn negative using SSA’s methodology. And it’s not unreasonable to suggest that reforms, whatever shape they might take, should be implemented sooner than 2029. After all, the need for reforms is well known, and we’re talking about it now! As for the SSA’s alternative scenarios, changes much sooner than 2033 would cause even lower returns.

While the SSA’s effort to provide the estimates is laudable, there are several aspects of the methodology that are questionable. SSA claims that the returns are real (inflation-adjusted) internal rates of return (IRRs), but they do not offer a detailed explanation of the inflation adjustment that must take place after calculating the nominal IRR. Using projected cost-of-living increases to inflate future benefits does not make the calculated IRRs “real”, if that’s what they have in mind. Second, the cost-of-living adjuster is the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners, which underestimates inflation experienced by the elderly. Third, they do not attempt to account for the probability of death before retirement, which would obviously reduce the return on contributions for single earners.

The “present-law” returns are essentially irrelevant, given the unfunded projected benefits. But the calculations under the alternative scenarios fail on other grounds: they are not “dynamic” in terms of adjusting for the economic impacts of the policy changes. In particular, higher payroll taxes are likely to reduce employment and slow the economy. A slowdown might even lead to additional claims on the system from earlier-than expected retirements. Thus, the higher payroll tax rates used by SSA will not be sufficient to close the gap. Likewise, reduced benefits would have a negative impact on the economy, reducing payroll tax collections. In both cases, dynamic economic effects would cause a wider funding gap; closing it will reduce returns more than suggested by SSA’s calculations.

An analysis by the Urban Institute in 2012 made somewhat arbitrary assumptions about rates of return. They used a 2% real rate of return to compound past contributions and discount future benefits (presumably with no cost-of-living adjustment). Under their assumptions, the value of payroll tax contributions at retirement often exceeds the discounted value of SS benefits for age cohorts turning 65 in 2010 and 2030. That implies that the real IRR must be lower than 2%.

As a hypothetical exercise, if individuals could invest their own payroll contributions over their working lives, significantly better returns could be earned than the IRRs discussed above, even if workers were forced into low-risk investments as they approach retirement. Therefore, the implied value of payroll contributions at retirement inherent in the IRR calculations is far too low. And while the discounting of retirement benefits at a relatively low rate reflects an appropriate conservatism, the level of SS benefits would not be competitive with the dollar returns on safe investments funded by a larger pot at retirement. The IRR calculations show only that the SS program is about as good as stuffing money into a mattress.

Unfortunately, the mattress might burn. The risks inherent in future SS benefits are substantial, and none of the reform alternatives are very popular. Some of the opposition is rooted in unreasonable criticism: No one has suggested programatic changes that would affect the benefits of anyone over the age of 55. Still, cuts in benefits for future retirees, delayed eligibility and higher payroll taxes are not easy sells. Another solution is to phase out the pay-as-you-go system, allowing younger workers the option of a a self-directed account (subject to certain restrictions), including a discounted “cash value” credit as a buyout for previous contributions. This was discussed in a recent post on Sacred Cow Chips.

Social Security is unsustainable and is an inter-generational rip-off in its current, pay-as-you-go form, as younger, less affluent workers subsidize current retirees, who are relatively wealthy as a class. Rather than shutting-down debate over reforms with exaggerated political claims, those interested in assuring a viable public retirement program should consider proposals that would give workers more choice and control, taking advantage of the higher returns available on private investments. Only this type of program can take advantage of the economy’s ability to convert savings into productive investment and real growth. Simple transfers from young to old do not leverage this process, and can never hope to compete with it.

Social Security: Saving or Tax? Proceeds or Aid?

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Government

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SOCSEC Negative Return

In general parlance, an entitlement is a thing to which one is entitled. If you have paid into Social Security (FICA payroll “contributions”), you should feel entitled to receive benefits one day. Why do I so often hear indignant complaints about the use of the term “entitlement” when applied to Social Security and Medicare? I’ve heard it from both ends of the political spectrum, but more often from the Left. It is usually accompanied by a statement about having “paid for those benefits!”. Exactly, you should feel entitled to them. You are not asking society to pay you alms!

Yet there seems to be resentment of an imagined implication that such “entitlements” are equivalent to “welfare” of some kind. That might be because the definition of an entitlement is somewhat different in the federal budget: it is a payment or benefit for which Congress sets eligibility rules with mandatory funding, as contrasted with discretionary budget items with explicit approval of funding. Because payments are based solely on eligibility, Social Security, Medicare and many forms of welfare benefits are all classified as entitlements in the federal budget. Obviously, those complaining about the use of the term in connection with Social Security believe there is a difference between their entitlement and welfare. But as long as they are willing to leave their “contributions” and future eligibility in the hands of politicians, their claim on future benefits is tenuous. Yes, you will pay FICA TAXES, and then you might be paid benefits (alms?) if you are eligible at that time. Certainly, the government has behaved as if the funds are fair game for use in the general budget.

Having made that minor rant, I can get to another point of this post: the Social Security retirement system offers terrible returns for its “beneficiaries”. Furthermore, it is insolvent, meaning that its long-term promises are, and will remain, unfunded under the current program design. However, there is a fairly easy fix for both problems from an economic perspective, if not from a political perspective.

The chart at the top of this post shows that Social Security benefits paid to eligible retirees are less than the payroll taxes those same individuals paid into the system. The chart is a couple of years old, but the facts haven’t changed. It’s boggling to realize that you’ll receive a negative return on the funds after a lifetime of “contributions”. That kind of investment performance should be condemned as unacceptable. However, you should know that the program is not “invested” in your retirement at all! Social Security’s so-called “trust fund” is almost a complete fiction. Most FICA tax revenue is not held “in trust”. Instead, it is paid out as an intergenerational transfer to current retirees. In the past, any surplus FICA tax revenue was invested in U.S. Treasury special purpose bonds, which funded part of the federal deficit. Here is a fairly good description of the process. The article quotes the Clinton Office of Management and Budget in the year 2000:

“These balances are available to finance future benefit payments … only in a bookkeeping sense. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits, or other expenditures.“

Unfortunately, for the past few years, instead of annual surpluses for the trust fund, deficits have been the rule and they are growing. Retiring baby boomers, longer life expectancies, slow income growth and declining labor force participation are taking a toll and will continue to do so. Something will have to change, but reform of any kind has been elusive. An important qualification is that almost any reform would have to be phased in as a matter of political necessity and fairness to current retirees. Unfortunately, just about every reform proposal I’ve heard has been greeted by distorted claims that it would harm either current retirees or those nearing retirement. In fact, leaving the program unaltered is likely to be a greater threat to everyone down the road.

There are three general categories of reform: higher payroll taxes, lower benefits, and at least partial privatization. Tax increases have obvious economic drawbacks, while straight benefit reductions would be harmful to future recipients even if that entailed means testing: the return on contributions is already negative, especially at the upper end of the income spectrum. Michael Tanner discusses specific options within each of these categories, including raising the normal and early retirement ages. None of the options close the funding gap, but at least higher retirement ages reflect the reality of longer life expectancies.

Early in his presidency, the George W. Bush administration offered a reform plan involving no tax increases or benefit cuts. Instead, the plan would have offered voluntary personal accounts for younger individuals. Needless to say, it was not adopted, but it would have kept the system in better shape than it is today. The key to success of any privatization is that unlike the Social Security Trust Fund, workers with private accounts can earn market returns on their contributions, which are in turn reinvested, allowing the accounts to grow faster over time. Tanner notes that 20 other countries have moved to private accounts including Chile, Australia, Mexico, Sweden, Poland, Latvia, Peru, and Uruguay. This sort of change does not preclude a separate social safety net for those who have been unable to accumulate a minimum threshold of assets, as Chile has done. Tanner’s article lays out details of a tiered plan that would allow participants a wider range of investments as their accumulated assets grow.

Economic research suggests that participants do not place a high value on their future benefits. From a 2007 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper by John Geanakoplos and Stephen Zeldes entitled “The Market Value of Social Security“:

“We find that the difference between market valuation and ‘actuarial’ valuation is large, especially when valuing the benefits of younger cohorts. … The market value of accrued benefits is only 2/3 of that implied by the actuarial approach.“

An implication is that younger workers who have already made contributions could be offered the choice of a future lump sum that is less than the actuarial present value of their benefits when they become eligible. Such a program could cut the long-term funding gap significantly, if the results found by Geanakoplos and Zeldes can be taken at face value, though it could create additional short-term funding pressure at the time of payment.

Qualified support for such a program seems apparent from another 2007 NBER paper by Jeffrey R. Brown, Marcus D. Casey and Olivia S. Mitchell entitled “Who Values the Social Security Annuity? New Evidence on the Annuity Puzzle“. They find that:

“Our first finding is that nearly three out of five respondents favor the lump-sum payment if it were approximately actuarially fair, a finding that casts doubt on several leading explanations for why more people do not annuitize. Second, there is some modest price sensitivity and evidence consistent with adverse selection; in particular, people in better health and having more optimistic longevity expectations are more likely to choose the annuity. Third, after controlling on education, more financially literate individuals prefer the annuity. Fourth, people anticipating future Social Security benefit reductions are more likely to choose the lump-sum, suggesting that political risk matters.“

Moreover, lump sums may offer an additional advantage from a funding perspective: a 2012 paper from the Michigan Retirement Research Center at the University of Michigan by Jingjing Chai, Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell and Ralph Rogalla called “Exchanging Delayed Social Security Benefits for Lump Sums: Could This Incentivize Longer Work Careers?” found that “... workers given the chance to receive their delayed retirement credit as a lump sum payment would boost their average retirement age by l.5-2 years.”

Certainly, it would be difficult for private accounts to fare as badly in terms of returns on contributions than the system has managed to date. The future appears even less promising without reform. There are several advantages to privatization of Social Security accounts beyond the likelihood of higher returns mentioned above: it would avoid some of the labor market distortions that payroll taxes entail, and it would increase the pool of national savings. Perhaps most importantly, over time, it would release the assets (and future benefits) accumulated by workers from the clutches of the state and self-interested politicians. They are not entitled to pursue their political ends with those assets; they are yours!