“Alabama, buckle up. You’ll soon learn how much your health insurance premiums will go up for next year. The percentage increase will probably be in the double digits.
But that’s nothing compared to what you’ll face in 2017. In May, I released a comprehensive study showing how the Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as Obamacare — will likely play out. The diagnosis isn’t good.
In two years, the ACA will cause substantial premium increases. This will likely cause Alabamians to leave the insurance market in droves — they won’t be able to afford health insurance, even with federal subsidies. Within a decade, this could swell the ranks of the uninsured by nearly 11 percent.
I reached this conclusion by using a peer-reviewed economic model published in several health journals. It was funded by both private and government sources, including the Department of Health and Human Services.
“ObamaCare hurts businesses. That’s the result of an exhaustive study polling small to medium-sized businesses.
The controversial government health-care reform increases company and employee costs and sometimes stops companies from hiring as well, participants told the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans in its new study.
“More than half of single employers believe the Affordable Care Act has had a negative effect on their company,” according to the report.
The survey, which polled some employers and their health-care pros, found that the majority of respondents, 54 percent, thought the effect of the ACA on their firms had been “negative” or “very negative.”
The same respondents also expected that the negative effects from ACA would increase to 66 percent in the near future as the program unfolds.”
“Several indicators suggest that the political waters may be calming for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This doesn’t guarantee that the law will achieve its goals and be judged a success. It means that the law stands a better chance of being implemented free of constant political turmoil–and will have a better shot at success.
Consider:
*Public support for the ACA fell after the Web site debacle last fall, but while overall opinion toward the law continues to tilt negative, the falloff in the polls has stopped, according to the June Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking poll.
*After the administration rapidly repaired the Web site, the ACA exceeded the widely cited 7 million target for the first open-enrollment season, which had become a political litmus test for the law. And with no similarly big controversy, the ACA has become a far less juicy, and less prominent, media story.
*Some Republicans seem to be shifting their midterm strategy to focus less on the ACA and more on other issues they have with the president and the direction of the country.
*More people say that they are getting their information on the law from personal experience and from the experiences of family and friends, and fewer say that they are getting it from the news media, which they also say focuses mostly on politics and not what the law means for them. Increasingly, public perception of the law is about people’s experiences–whether good or bad–rather than ideology and partisan politics.”
“The Supreme Court’s ruling this week that “closely-held” companies like Hobby Lobby aren’t obligated to comply with the health law’s contraception mandate because it conflicts with their religious beliefs has put a renewed focus on the employer-sponsored healthcare.
Consumers getting their healthcare through their employers is a deeply ingrained practice in the United States (although that trend has been diminishing in recent years), and the court ruling has sparked all kinds of arguments pertaining to that the arrangement. Some have concluded that it will lead workers to seek alternatives outside the workplace, which they can find on the federal health exchanges created under Obamacare.
However, a new poll from Morning Consult found that the public isn’t there yet.
In fact, a strong majority of workers are worried that their employers will stop offering health insurance altogether and move them into the Obamacare exchanges. Workers with employer-sponsored health plans largely have a negative view of what such a move would mean for their coverage, and would even consider looking for a new job under that scenario, the poll found.”
“Robert Gibbs’ prediction that Obamacare’s employer mandate would — and perhaps should — be jettisoned shocked Democrats back in April.
By July, the former aide and longtime confidant of President Barack Obama had a lot more company. More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good. Among them are experts at the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund and prominent academics like legal scholar Tim Jost.
The employer mandate, Jost wrote in a Health Affairs post in June, “cries out for repair.” Repealing it “might not be such a bad idea,” if it’s replaced with something better for workers and busi
“There are hundreds of aspects of Obamacare that people argue over. But there’s one question that matters above all others: does the Affordable Care Act live up to its name? Does it make health insurance less expensive? Last November, our team at the Manhattan Institute published a study indicating that Obamacare had increased the underlying cost of individually-purchased health insurance in the average state by 41 percent in 2014, relative to 2013. We’ve now redone the study on a county-by-county basis, complete with a brand-new interactive map. Depending on where you live, the results may surprise you.
Our new county-by-county analysis was led by Yegeniy Feyman, who compiled the county-based data for 27-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and 64-year-olds, segregated by gender. We were able to obtain data for 3,137 of the United States’ 3,144 counties.”
“Two years ago Saturday, the Supreme Court changed the law that changed an industry.
The Court’s June 28, 2012, decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act—by the slender margin of a single vote—did more than allow the law’s ambitious agenda to proceed. It famously altered the law itself, by allowing states to choose whether or not to opt into Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”
“For months we’ve been hearing about consumers’ struggles with the state’s new health exchange program. Jesse Jones explains that they’re not alone in the fight — even some of the people paid to work the system are having a hard time.
Martha Gant is an insurance agent who’s used to helping others but now she’s the one in need.”
“When I wrote last week about the slow start for Obamacare’s small business exchanges, I mentioned that some states could slow down the marketplaces’ progress even further in 2015 because of a possible delay recently created by the Obama administration.
The small business exchanges, like the law’s individual exchanges, are a virtual marketplace where businesses with 50 or fewer employees can compare health plans. Besides offering a limited tax credit, Obamacare small business exchanges, or SHOP, are supposed to offer one particular feature that changes the healthcare landscape for small companies: choice.”
“For Democratic lawmakers who were hesitant to sign onto the sweeping 2010 health care law, one of the most powerful selling points was that the Affordable Care Act would actually reduce the federal budget deficit, despite the additional costs of extending health insurance coverage to the uninsured.
Four years after enactment of what is widely viewed as President Barack Obama’s key legislative achievement, however, it’s unclear whether the health care law is still on track to reduce the deficit or whether it may actually end up adding to the federal debt. In fact, the answer to that question has become something of a mystery.”