The costs of providing health care to an average American family surpassed $25,000 for the first time in 2016 — even as the rate of health cost increases slowed to a record low, a new analysis revealed Tuesday.
The $25,826 in health-care costs for a typical family of four covered by a employer-sponsored “preferred provider plan” is $1,155 higher than last year, and triple what it cost to provide health care for the same family in 2001, the first year that Milliman Medical Index analysis was done.
And it’s the 11th consecutive year that the total dollar increase in the average family’s health-care costs exceeded $1,110, actuarial services firm Milliman noted as it released the index.
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ObamaCare is bringing out corporate America’s worst crony-capitalist impulses. The health-insurance lobby has teamed up with trial lawyers to sue the federal government—through individual lawsuits and a $5 billion class action—for not following through on a bailout deal buried in the law. This provision, the risk corridor program, would have required taxpayers to bail out insurers for losing money on the health-care exchanges. In late 2013, Sen. Marco Rubio introduced legislation to repeal the provision entirely and later another bill to make the program budget neutral. When it came time to pass a spending bill at the end of 2014, Congress succeeded in making it the law of the land that the bailout program could not cost taxpayers a single cent—which ended up saving taxpayers $2.5 billion. In December of last year, they repeated the feat. Now, Rubio is urging leaders in both the House and Senate to make this a priority and stop the bailout a third time.
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ObamaCare premium increases will be higher than last year, according to a new analysis of early data.
The analysis from the consulting firm Avalere Health finds that proposed ObamaCare premiums for silver-level plans are increasing an average of 16 percent in nine states that so far have complete data.The proposed increases for silver plans, the most popular, vary widely, from a 44 percent average increase in Vermont to a 5 percent increase in Washington state.
The increases appear to be higher than last year on average. An Avalere analysis at a similar point in the process last year found an average increase of about 6 percent.
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The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) has proposed a plan to “rebalance” Medicaid eligibility in the Sooner State. Although OHCA’s “plan” so far consists of only a single page of bullet points, what little that is already known makes clear that the plan would gut the existing Insure Oklahoma program and replace it with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion by another name. Oklahoma policymakers should quickly reject OHCA’s latest proposal to expand Obamacare and refocus their efforts on improving the program for the most vulnerable.
Thousands of kids and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Oklahoma are already sitting on Medicaid waiting lists to get the home and community-based services that they desperately need.
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