Paul Ryan: “I want to address just the main criticism the gentleman from Virginia just mentioned. Two things. He says adverse…”

“I want to address just the main criticism the gentleman from Virginia just mentioned. Two things. He says adverse selection, which means healthy and wealthy people will leave other health care plans and premiums will go up for everybody else. Point number one. The Office of Personnel Management took this concern very seriously. So when they constructed this new health savings account option within the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan, an additional option for Federal employees, they designed the premium so that that would not happen. Specifically, Federal employees would pay $42.25 every 2 weeks for the Mail Handlers high deductible plan compared to $45.16 for the standard coverage, an insignificant difference of $2.81 for every 2 weeks. For family coverage, the difference would be 11 cents. These very small differences in premiums will ensure that healthy employees are not attracted to HSAs by their premium. So the concern of the gentleman, which is a concern, was already addressed by the OPM. But one more point and the second point is this. All of the data on adverse selection has been coming back and none of it has been true.”