Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner on why she supports President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Tom Price as the next Health Secretary.
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Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner on why she supports President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Tom Price as the next Health Secretary.
The Obama administration is trying to calm the panic over soaring ObamaCare premiums by pointing to subsidies many will receive to offset the cost — but analysts and GOP lawmakers counter that those subsidies nevertheless will stick taxpayers with a rising bill.
With enrollment set to begin Nov. 1, the administration announced Monday that premiums are set rise an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market. Some states, such as Arizona, will see premiums jump by as much as 116 percent.
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Obamacare is collapsing. Its utter failures become more obvious by the day. We all remember the promises of Obamacare, chief among them that the “Affordable Care Act” would lower health care costs. The opposite has occurred. Despite the offer of subsidies through the exchanges, enrollment in Obamacare has been dismal. Younger, healthier individuals have little interest in paying exorbitant premiums for insurance plans that come with $5,000 deductibles. The result has been an unbalanced insurance pool where insurers must charge ever-increasing premiums to continue offering coverage.
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When Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey announced recently that it’s $46 million in debt and shutting down, it became the 17th failed ObamaCare co-op since the Affordable Care Act launched three years ago.
Those failures – just six of the original 23 co-ops remain – have left hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for coverage.
Meanwhile, insurers claiming big losses are leaving some state exchanges — including Indiana University Health Plans, whose exit is expected to result in 27,000 Indiana residents losing ObamaCare plans in 2017. And companies still operating in the federal and state exchanges are raising premiums for next year.
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President Obama and his Democratic allies are seizing on the exodus of private insurers from ObamaCare markets to renew their push for a so-called “public option” — but Republicans say more “government intervention” is not the answer to the latest Affordable Care Act woes.
A public option — or insurance plan offered by the government — had been written into early versions of the bill but failed to make the final cut in the law signed by Obama in March 2010.
But with many states seeing private insurers exit ObamaCare markets amid concerns over cost and other factors, Democrats see a silver lining to what critics are calling another ObamaCare crisis — a reason to bring the option back.
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According to a recently-updated analysis conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation of 14 major cities, the lowest-cost and second-lowest cost silver plans are expected to rise by a weighted average of 9% in 2017. But residents in some states are going to have it far worse. Through last weekend, insurers in a dozen states had their rate requests for 2017 finalized. Residents in the vast majority of the approved states are looking at double-digit percentage increases. As aggregated by ACASignUps.net, four of the first 12 states to finalize their rate requests for 2017 are looking at weighted increases of at least 30%.
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Six years after ObamaCare was signed into law – and countless assurances later that the law is “working” – America’s major insurance companies are facing mounting losses and threatening to pull out of the exchanges, leaving customers facing higher costs and fewer options.
In the most recent example, Tennessee regulators are bowing to pressure to let insurers refile their 2017 rate requests, which could lead to steep hikes for customers. A state official acknowledged to The Tennessean they are “not alone” in letting companies seek bigger increases — as some insurers head for the exits.
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The Congressional Budget Office projects millions of workers will leave employer-sponsored health plans over the next decade because of ObamaCare.
Some will opt to go on Medicaid, but others will be kicked off their company plans by employers who decide not to offer coverage anymore, according to a new CBO report titled, “Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance Coverage for People Under Age 65: 2016 to 2026.”
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Humana Inc. has added its name to the list of mega-medical insurers to report big problems under ObamaCare.
The Louisville, Ky.- based company does not expect to make enough money this year in premiums from individual plans to cover what it will pay out in claims, according to a regulatory filing made last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Humana, which is being acquired by Aetna Inc., said it is still trying to figure out how big the gap will be.