Note: An updated analysis of Collins’ latest proposal is available here.

The tax bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee repeals the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, the requirement that most people have health insurance coverage or pay a penalty. Senator Susan Collins has argued that the harmful effects of repealing the mandate — higher premiums, more individual market instability, and millions more uninsured — could be mitigated if the President and Congress also adopted two additional pieces of legislation: the bipartisan individual market reform package from Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray and the reinsurance bill from Senators Collins and Bill Nelson. But as we’ve explained, the Alexander-Murray bill — while good policy on its own — would come nowhere close to undoing the damage from individual mandate repeal. The same is true of the Collins-Nelson proposal.

The Collins-Nelson bill would provide $2.25 billion in each of 2018 and 2019 in federal funding for state reinsurance programs. (While states could supplement this federal funding, they wouldn’t be required to do so.) Reinsurance programs reimburse insurers for some or all of the costs associated with the highest-cost claims.

While the Collins-Nelson proposal is a sensible standalone measure, it would come nowhere close to undoing the damaging effects of repealing the mandate. Repealing the mandate would reduce federal spending on coverage programs by over $300 billion over the coming decade, which the tax bill uses to pay for permanent corporate tax cuts. Reversing the coverage losses and other harmful consequences of mandate repeal would require dedicating that amount, or significantly more, to that purpose.

More specifically, the Collins-Nelson bill — or any similar federal reinsurance proposal — would not undo the mandate repeal’s effects on premiums, market stability, or coverage.