Tom Price: ‘Age Is the Thing that Correlates Best to What Health Coverage Costs’

RUSH EXCERPT:
TODD: "Why not means test the tax credits? Why do it by age where you may essentially have it where you’re incentivizing folks not to buy health insurance until they actually need it?”
PRICE: “It’s a great question. In fact, I’ve been working on this for so long I’ve gone through the phase where I’ve had it completely related to income and became convinced by the folks who do this on a day-to-day basis, day in and day out basis, that the most predictive element of an individual’s life in terms of what health coverage will cost is not income and it makes sense, it’s age. As your age increases your health care costs increase and the cost of the coverage increases. So they’ve pegged it to age. There’s an opportunity to put some means testing in there, but that’s not the most — that’s not the correlation factor to what it actually costs. Age is the thing that correlates best to what health coverage costs.”