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“One of the ironies of this ballot initiative is that some of the information that we really need to craft it properly and assess its impact thoroughly, we can only get after it passes."

"The number of people who will pay because they sell their own home is vanishingly small," agrees Evan Horowitz of the non-partisan Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis.

We don’t know, and neither do the authors of the Tufts University Center for State Policy Analysis report who concluded, “it’s not clear whether dental insurers are currently close to — or far from — the proposed 83% requirement...”

cSPA, which issued a report on the ballot question, didn’t suggest that premiums would increase, but said that the amounts insurers pay to dentists might rise, though ”the scale of these increases should be limited,” the report said.

“But, if they make the changes that we’ve seen in other states, some people move — not too many, but some — and lots of people try to hide their money or avoid taxes in other ways, then you end up raising about $1.3 billion.”

But of the households that had incomes higher than $1 million in 2019, only about a third of that income came from salaries or paychecks, according to a report from Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis.

A study from Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis estimated that the surtax would bring in $1.3 billion in 2023 and apply to 0.6% of Massachusetts households in any given year.

“This did not come out of a rigorous set of studies or a deep analysis of the dental insurance world,” he said. “Nobody’s done that, and partly we haven’t done that because that information just doesn’t exist."

The CSPA report says insurers could meet the 83% standard in several ways, such as covering a wide range of procedures or by letting dentists charge a higher price and pass costs onto patients.