health_insurance_premiums_without_medicare_part_b is currently treated as a hard calibration target, but there is no clean administrative national total for household premium outlays excluding Medicare Part B.
Why the current target is weak:
- The current benchmark is MEPS/NHEA-based, which is better than CPS but still not a clean administrative total.
- CMS NHEA is the best official macro source here, but it is an account series assembled from mixed inputs and residual methods, not a one-to-one administrative measure of this exact concept.
- That makes it a weak hard target if we are trying to keep the calibration set admin-first.
Proposed change:
- Demote
health_insurance_premiums_without_medicare_part_b from a hard calibration target.
- If we want to retain a consistency check, define an explicit NHEA-based soft benchmark and document the concept mismatch.
- Keep
medicare_part_b_premiums as the clean admin-backed target.
Primary sources:
health_insurance_premiums_without_medicare_part_bis currently treated as a hard calibration target, but there is no clean administrative national total for household premium outlays excluding Medicare Part B.Why the current target is weak:
Proposed change:
health_insurance_premiums_without_medicare_part_bfrom a hard calibration target.medicare_part_b_premiumsas the clean admin-backed target.Primary sources: