ObamaCare enrollees should brace themselves for another year of double-digit premium hikes.
Average premiums for plans sold through the state and federal insurance exchanges will jump as much as 32% next year, according to a recent report from actuarial firm Milliman. Consumers in some markets could face 80% rate hikes, according to a separate analysis from Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Democrats have pounced on these projections to blame the GOP for “marketplace sabotage.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., remarked that “Republicans and the Trump administration own any and all increases in health care premiums for American consumers.”
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War On Drugs: We recently speculated that ObamaCare might have contributed to the nation’s opioid epidemic, which has in turn driven down life expectancy in this country for the past two years. A new Senate report adds further support to this connection.
Interestingly, while trying to craft legislation that would appeal to Republican moderates in the Senate, Cassidy and Graham have created a plan that is in some ways more conservative than the earlier House and Senate repeal-and-replace bills. The Cassidy-Graham bill is comparatively simple and straightforward. It lets states run their insurance markets as they see fit. This is a welcome return to federalist principles that the GOP had forgotten when crafting their earlier ObamaCare replacement bills.
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In Iowa, the state’s sole remaining insurer announced on Thursday that it wants to boost ObamaCare premiums by 57%. This isn’t exactly the vibrant, competitive, low-cost market that Democrats promised. But it is the inevitable outcome of ObamaCare’s government-knows-best approach to health care.
Earlier this year, Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield announced that they were pulling out of Iowa’s ObamaCare exchange, leaving only Medica, which was also threatening to leave. Not surprisingly, Medica has used its newfound monopoly status to push for increasingly higher rates, while trying to pin the blame President Trump for the increases.
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On Monday the Congressional Budget Office released its cost estimate of the Republican Senate Better Care Reconciliation Act. CBO calculated that the proposed bill would reduce the deficit by $321 billion over the next decade. That is welcome news.
Less welcome, however, was CBO’s conclusion that the Senate bill would result in an additional 15 million uninsured in 2018 due to a lack of penalties. By 2026, CBO reports 22 million more Americans would be uninsured, primarily due to lower Medicaid coverage.
No matter that the number of Americans on the Obamacare exchanges is shrinking due to higher prices and fewer companies offering coverage.
Dave Hoppe, former chief of staff to House Speaker Paul Ryan, asked me in an email, “If there are few insurance companies offering insurance through the exchanges in 10 years, how are people without insurance losing anything?”
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Cost overruns are endemic to government health programs, and ObamaCare is turning out to be no different. Not only are its Medicaid expansion costs exploding, skyrocketing premiums are now pushing insurance subsidy costs through the roof.
A new study from the Center for Health and Economy finds that because of the double-digit premium increases across the country, federal spending on ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies will shoot up by nearly $10 billion next year
That’s because the amount of the subsidy is directly tied to the cost of insurance in any given market. The Obama administration treats this as a cardinal virtue of ObamaCare, because the subsidies largely shield eligible enrollees from premium rate shocks. In fact, the administration has argued that higher premiums are a good thing, because they make more people eligible for those subsidies.
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Millions of emergency room patients could face financial ruin — even if they deliberately seek care at hospitals covered by their insurers.
That’s the disturbing finding of a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by two Yale professors, the study shows that 1 in 5 ER visits involve doctors who are not in the same insurance network as their hospitals. The patients treated by those out-of-network physicians are forced to pay for a portion of their care out-of-pocket. The average out-of-network ER charge is $600.
A bill that size spells disaster for many patients. About half of Americans wouldn’t be able to cover a surprise $400 bill without selling something or borrowing money.
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The bitter, long-running fight over ObamaCare’s individual and employer mandates is all over but the shouting.
The problems plaguing the ObamaCare exchanges as enrollment lags, premiums spike and insurers from Aetna to UnitedHealth head for the exits have reached a critical stage, even as the penalties are about to spike for far too many millions of people who get a bad deal from the law. This year, 8 million people paid the individual mandate penalty — not too far from the 10.6 million who had coverage via the exchanges at the end of June. The status quo won’t survive the inevitable political backlash, nor should it. ObamaCare is like a car with a bad muffler: It can keep traveling down the road, even as everyone it passes begs the driver to pull over and get it serviced.
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Roughly 8 million people faced ObamaCare individual mandate penalties this year totaling more than $3 billion, an analysis of the latest IRS data reveals.
Despite the controversy and high-stakes legal battle that has surrounded the individual mandate, the scope of the penalties paid this year has gone unreported by major news outlets as attention has focused on ObamaCare’s latest and most glaring problems: weak enrollment, surging premiums, and insurer losses that have provoked the exit of UnitedHealth, Aetna and Humana from most state exchanges.
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Aetna’s decision to abandon its ObamaCare expansion plans and rethink its participation altogether came as a surprise to many. It shouldn’t have. Everything that’s happened now was predicted by the law’s critics years ago.
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said that this was supposed to be a break-even year for its ObamaCare business. Instead, the company has already lost $200 million, which it expect that to hit $320 million before the year it out. He said the company was abandoning plans to expand into five other states and is reviewing whether to stay in the 15 states where Aetna (AET) current sells ObamaCare plans.
Aetna’s announcement follows UnitedHealth Group’s (UNH) decision to leave most ObamaCare markets, Humana’s (HUM) decision to drop out of some, Blue Cross Blue Shield’s announcement that it was quitting the individual market in Minnesota, and the failure of most of the 23 government-created insurance co-ops.
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