More than half of the states have disclosed just how much higher their health care premiums could be next year under the Affordable Care Act, and some of the potential increases are jaw-dropping.
But Illinois residents won’t get their first look at proposed 2017 premiums until Aug. 1, and that has consumer advocates frustrated.
Insurance companies had to submit rate plans for Illinois in April, but the state doesn’t require the proposals to be made public upon filing, according to the Department of Insurance. In addition, the director of the department considers health plan filings confidential and exempt from Freedom of Information requests.
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Consumers are facing the prospect of significant premium increases for health insurance next year and faulty ACA provisions are at least partly to blame.
For example, people have figured out they can get a year’s worth of medical care while paying just nine months of premiums. They also can wait to sign up for health insurance after they get sick and get the care they need. And young people are required to pay much more for health coverage than they expect to need in medical services so many just don’t enroll.
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Obamacare has invented a dangerous new way to hide federal spending, including more than $100 billion designed to look like tax cuts.
In defiance of standard United States government accounting practices (and the government’s standard definitions of terms), Obamacare labels its direct outlays to insurance companies “tax credits” (not outlays)—even though they don’t actually cut anyone’s taxes. In this way, Obamacare is masking some $104 billion in federal spending over a decade.
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The fate of the Obama administration’s significant investments in biomedical research will end up in the hands of either a candidate with a long, wonky track record on health and medicine — with mixed results — or the candidate whose views are an almost complete mystery.
Clinton “really knows what’s going on and is a policy wonk on medical research as well as health care,” said Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, a coalition of groups that promote medical research. Trump, however, has such an “in the moment” approach to medical research — almost never raising the issue unless someone asks him about it — that it will be impossible to know what he’d do until people ask him more questions, she said.
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Maryland’s health cooperative filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to block the federal government from requiring it to pay more than $22 million in fees for a program designed to cover insurance company shortfalls.
The lawsuit by Evergreen Health Cooperative Inc. is the latest twist in the saga of health insurance co-ops set up under the Affordable Care Act to compete against larger, established insurers.
The co-ops were supposed to help keep premiums down by injecting competition into the industry. Instead, 13 of 23 startups that launched successfully have since collapsed, forcing more than 700,000 consumers to seek new insurance. A number of co-op officials have said they were hurt by the federal program because of a formula it used to spread out risk, which they say hurts them while benefiting large, already established insurance companies.
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About 1,000 health care economists from around the country descend on Philadelphia this week for the biennial conference of the American Society of Health Economists.
Think of it as Woodstock for health geeks who will, over several days, present nearly 550 papers covering insurance, hospital mergers and a host of other issues.
Of all those, Obamacare will be the jam that gets played over and over with 78 papers focused on some aspect of the law.
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