Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce has analyzed all publicly available information for health-insurance premiums from healthcare.gov and state insurance departments. It then calculated the weighted averages for all health-insurance plans available on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges. The weighted average gives a more accurate view of overall premium increases, because it takes into account each insurance plan’s market share.
Findings reveal that nationally, premiums for individual health plans increased on average between 2015 and 2016 by 14.9%. Consumers in every state except Mississippi faced increased premiums, and in no fewer than 29 states the average increases were in the double digits. For a third of states, the average premiums rose 20% or more.
Eliminating the artificially low limits on FSA accounts would provide significant benefits to families with special-needs children, diabetics, and employees who – or whose families – need vision, hearing, dental or orthodontic care, or any other health care not normally covered by health insurance. It would also lessen the pain of higher health insurance deductibles and other patient cost-sharing, which could even reduce insurance premiums, and therefore federal premium subsidies. The result would be substantial help with health care expenses to families who need it most, with a minimal impact to the federal budget.
In addition, eliminating the FSA “use it or lose it” rules would provide benefits to those same families and many more, while at the same time eliminating wasteful health care spending and possibly reducing health insurance premiums, with almost no
This week, we learned that ObamaCare enrollments are nearly 40% below the original projections—further proof that the American people want nothing to do with this flawed system.
Under the Obama administration, we are becoming a nation of rules—not laws—dictated by a president and a White House who are more concerned with pursuing a partisan political agenda than they are with serving the American people.
Nowhere is the disregard for the laws of our nation—and the failure of our bloated, inept, partisan government—more obvious than in the way the Democrats foisted ObamaCare on us. And the way in which it has utterly failed to help Americans get the quality, affordable health care we were promised.
Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina outlines her blueprint to repeal ObamaCare and promote the free market in health care.
The law being implemented today is in many ways quite different than the law passed by a very temporary super-majority of Democrats back in 2010. It is highly likely that the ACA-as-implemented could not possibly have secured enough votes for passage in March 2010.
Likewise, we already know that neither the ACA-as-enacted nor ACA-as-implemented could possibly secure majority support in today’s Congress. Not only do all Republican presidential candidates want the law repealed and replaced, but so does the current front-runner in the New Hampshire Democratic primary.
Too many in the general public do not realize that five provisions of Obamacare have already been repealed.
The Affordable Care Act was signed into law nearly six years ago. Since that time, 106 regulations have been finalized to implement the ACA. These regulations will cost businesses and individuals more than $45 billion and will require approximately 165 million hours of paperwork in order to comply.
In addition to these regulations, hundreds of guidance documents regarding the ACA have been published by various federal agencies during this time as well. However, more regulations—and additional costs—are still to come.
One reason why the anger over ObamaCare has subsided somewhat could be that more than 70 significant changes have been made to the law since it was enacted in 2010—delaying, weakening, and eliminating some of its more onerous and burdensome provisions. The law that is being implemented is not the one Congress passed.
By our updated count at the Galen Institute, at least 43 of the changes to the Affordable Care Act have been made unilaterally by the Obama administration, 24 have passed Congress and been signed into law by President Obama, and three were made by the Supreme Court, which had to rewrite the law to uphold it.
The House GOP emerged from its retreat earlier this month united in its goal to come up with an alternative to Obamacare. But the deeper into health policy the members dig, the more difficult finding consensus will become.
Republicans have determined that they will select pieces of different GOP proposals rather than simply put forth one of the party’s old plans as its main health proposal. The older conservative health plans are unworkable in a post-ACA world.
Repealing the Affordable Care Act is not enough. The country has been drifting toward full federal control of health care for decades. What’s needed is a credible plan to reorient federal policy across the board toward markets and the preferences of consumers and patients, and away from one-size-fits-all bureaucratic micromanagement.
Lanhee Chen and James Capretta, along with 8 other colleagues, have developed such a plan. This plan would:
– Retain employer coverage for 155 million Americans
– Provide age-adjusted tax credits to individuals without employer-sponsored coverage
– Allow for continuous coverage protection
– Reform the Medicaid and Medicare programs
– Expand the use of Health Savings Accounts
Last week’s seven-candidate debate hosted by the Fox Business Network once again found much to discuss in terms of national security issues, immigration law enforcement, even a little economic policy, and, of course, the latest round of character attacks and counter-attacks. Still missing in action: at least the first subcutaneous probe of where the respective candidates stand on health policy issues.
Based on recent performance, it’s questionable whether health policy has attracted sufficient interest among the media and Republican primary voters to command more than a few seconds on the debate stage. But it’s not for lack of potential lines of inquiry.
Here are some questions to the candidates from Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute that still await new rounds of oversimplified, evasive, or (one might hope) thoughtful answers.
Moving to single-payer in the U.S. would require massive new taxes that would stifle growth, and consolidating all power over the health system in the federal government would lead, in time, to second-rate health care for many millions of people. Democrats praise Medicare’s simplicity, but giving the Medicare bureaucracy the power to set prices for all medical services in the U.S. would lead to the misallocation of billions of dollars.
The federal government has no good way to know what the proper price should be for the thousands of different services provided to patients, and thus would overpay for many while underpaying for many others. The result of applying this kind of mindless regulation system-wide would be impaired access to many needed services and the slow exodus of the nation’s best and brightest out of medicine and into other pursuits.