Friday, November 14, 2014

Can we Nudge ourselves to reduced medical insurance premiums?

Today's NYT Upshot has good news about stable or even declining premiums available to individuals who enroll during the current ACA open enrollment period. However, author Margot Sanger-Katz notes that failing to actively shop and re-enroll could be costly for many:

History suggests that a lot of people will avoid shopping again and simply renew their old plans. That will be a mistake. Some will miss out on savings. Others may face miscalculations of their federal subsidies and a surprise bill come tax time.
 We are reading Nudge this week in my Econ 625 class. What would the authors of this book suggest as a better way of structuring the ACA re-enrollment process? One obvious change would be to force everyone to actively re-enroll every year "from scratch," by offering no time or effort saving for choosing the "same as before" option. This is probably much easier said than done.