ObamaCare’s impact on health costs.
In an effort to prevent more insurers from abandoning the Obamacare exchange in Tennessee, the state’s insurance regulator is allowing health insurers refile 2017 rate requests by Aug. 12 after Cigna and Humana said their previously requested premium hikes were too low.
Cigna and Humana filed to increase last year’s premiums an average of 23 and 29 percent, respectively, on June 10. But in the interim, both insurance companies have told state regulators that the requests would not cover the expected claims, said Kevin Walters, spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance.
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Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama is seeking an average rate increase of 39 percent on individual plans offered through the Obamacare marketplace, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The proposed rate hikes will affect more than 160,000 people in Alabama who purchase insurance through the federal exchange, or about 5 percent of Blue Cross membership.
Rate increases range from 26 to 41 percent, depending on the type of plan. Proposed increases are lowest for bronze plans, which offer the least amount of coverage, and greatest for the most popular silver plans.
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Projected employer benefit costs are a stark contrast to the expected premium increases and out-of-pocket costs on the Obamacare exchanges next year. Employer-sponsored premium increases are expected to be about half of what has been proposed on individual exchanges for next year. Net deductibles are expected to be, on average, about one-third of those on exchange plans.
The difference could be explained in part by the relative age of the different marketplaces. While insurers are still adjusting to the relatively new Obamacare exchanges, the employer-based marketplace has many more years of experience to help keep costs stable. The employer market also likely has a better mix of sick and healthy people, helping keep costs down, on average.
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House Speaker Paul Ryan’s health care blueprint, released late last month as part of his “A Better Way” reform agenda, would deliver affordable, accessible health coverage at less cost and with less disruption to the health care market than Obamacare. Ryan’s plan would slash premiums by, among other things, getting rid of Obamacare’s costly essential-health-benefit mandates. People would be free to purchase low-cost plans that don’t cover procedures they don’t want or need. The plan would also make health coverage more affordable for middle class families by replacing Obamacare’s complicated scheme of subsidies with more straightforward, age-based, refundable tax credits.
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On Monday, Illinois citizens were jolted by a piercing pain in the wallet as federal officials unveiled proposed Obamacare insurance premium rates for 2017. Insurers plan to dial up rates as much as a heart-stopping 45 percent for those who buy plans on the Obamacare marketplace when open enrollment starts Nov. 1.
That means thousands of people will scramble for affordable insurance … and won’t find it.
Is this rate shock unforeseen? Not really. Rocketing Obamacare rate requests have become an annual rite of summer, as welcome as sunstroke.
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The latest rates for health insurance under Obamacare in New Hampshire range from a drop of less than a half-percent to nearly a 60 percent increase, depending on the insurer.
All insurers offering health plans in the exchange had to present their proposals by Monday for the year beginning Jan. 1.
The dominant health insurer, Anthem, had the lowest proposal — a decrease of four-tenths of 1 percent from the preferred provider organization for the “off exchange” population.
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Usually it’s a good thing that everything’s bigger in Texas, but that isn’t true when it comes to health-insurance premiums for Obamacare. Recent federal data show that Texas’ largest insurer on the Obamacare exchanges is seeking average premium increases of nearly 60 percent for 2017- among the highest hikes in the entire country.
As a result, at least 600,000 policyholders with Blue Cross Blue Shield may quickly find their insurance coverage is unaffordable.
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Insurers want to crank up the cost of health insurance premiums by as much as 45 percent for Illinois residents who buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, the most popular insurer on the state’s Obamacare exchange, is proposing increases ranging from 23 percent to 45 percent in premiums for its individual health-care plans, according to proposed 2017 premiums that were made public Monday. The insurer blamed the sought-after hikes mainly on changes in the costs of medical services.
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In a Health Affairs article, Loren Adler and Paul Ginsburg from the Center for Health Policy at the Brookings Institution make the claim that Obamacare has lowered health insurance premiums. Adler and Ginsburg claim that, in 2014, premiums for the second-lowest cost “silver” plan were “between 10 and 21% lower than average individual market premiums in 2013,” the year before Obamacare went into effect. Yet the Government Accountability Office has found that, in early 2013, the median plan in the median state for a healthy 30-year-old man had an annual premium of just $1,558. By comparison, according to the Kaiser Health Calculator, the nationwide average annual premium for the second-lowest cost “silver” plan for a 30-year-old man is now $3,186—more than twice as much.
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Health plans sold on Michigan’s insurance exchange could see an average 17.3% increase next year, and if recent history is any guide, state regulators could approve the insurance companies’ rate hike requests without many — if any — changes.
The rate increases would mean a financial hit for taxpayers in general and the 345,000 Michiganders who buy their health insurance on the Healthcare.gov exchange, created under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
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