Another Ticking Time Bomb in the ACA

[stuy119]

Was up late reading and came across this nugget in an article:

The second large design problem that the rosy health-costs scenario allows the administration to ignore reaches even closer to the heart of Obamacare. After the law's designers got their first real CBO score in 2009, they realized they had to find some way to cut the projected costs of the law's exchange subsidies if they were to have any chance of pretending the law would cost less than a trillion dollars over a decade. So they inserted a provision that kicks in in 2018 and requires that, if the cost of the exchange subsidies exceeds 0.5 percent of GDP in any given year, the level of subsidy would be cut in a means-tested way. The provision didn't draw much attention even from health wonks at first, but in 2011 the CBO produced an analysis of it showing that it would cause very significant declines not just in the growth of subsidies but in their nominal value year-over-year for many middle-class families. These families' out-of-pocket costs would quickly grow larger than the penalty (or tax, for John Roberts fans) they would have to pay for not having coverage, and many could well opt to go uninsured until they needed care.

It was from this article:
The Unaffordable Care Act - By Yuval Levin - The Corner - National Review Online

Several interesting points in there.