The Affordable Care Act (ACA) guarantees access to care regardless of preexisting conditions. Yet Christopher Briggs has struggled for years to find an ACA plan that covers his seven-year-old daughter’s leukemia treatment. In 2017, NPR reported, “Under ACA, Self-Employed Father Can’t Buy Coverage for His Child with Cancer.” Why?

The law’s preexisting-conditions provisions include government price controls that impose both a price floor that increases health insurance premiums for healthy consumers and a price ceiling that reduces premiums for the sick. Economists warn that the latter type of price control can reduce quality.

To prevent the ACA’s preexisting-conditions provisions from reducing the quality of coverage available to the sick, the law’s authors created insurer subsidies whose purpose is to counteract those effects. But are those subsidies working?