Here’s what’s going on with 2015 health insurance premiums and what you need to know. Increases are in the single digits, a not-terrible showing.
The best you have to offer, from a Pro-Bammy, Pro-ACA site, is that the rate increases are "not terrible"?
And of course Bammy and his social engineers used a contemptible tactic to keep the inevitable rate increases artificially low - they designed plans with massive deductibles.
Americans seeking cheap insurance on the Obamacare health exchanges may be in for sticker shock if they get sick next year, as consumers trade lower premiums for out-of-pocket costs that can top $6,000 a person. Expenses for some policies can reach $6,350 for a single person and $12,700 per family, the most allowed by the health-care law, according to a survey by HealthPocket Inc. of seven states, including California and Ohio. That’s 26 percent higher than the average deductible in the seven states, and a scenario likely repeated across the country, said Kev Coleman, head of research and data at Sunnyvale, California-based HealthPocket.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...tibles-26-higher-make-cheap-rates-a-risk.html
For some, Obamacare deductibles deliver sticker shock. The Affordable Care Act is turning out to be less than affordable for some consumers. That’s because many of the plans carry huge deductibles, creating potential financial problems for middle-class consumers. Some “bronze”-level plans, the lowest level of coverage, carry deductibles as high as $12,700 per year for a family of four.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamacare-deductibles-deliver-hefty-sticker-shock/
Oh, yeah, and you fail to acknowledge that Bammy and his cynical compatriots put off a significant portion of the employer mandate until 2015, to avoid blowback during the 2014 elections.
Shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services produced an analysis that predicted the employer mandates and increased costs would force “66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans” to be canceled. That was the “mid-range” estimate, one that went unnoticed until the mass cancellations of plans in the individual market. As Forbes’ Avik Roy argued at the time, it meant that the churn in the individual market provided just an appetizer to the main course of market disruption that will come this fall.
The White House has been attempting to avoid its consequences ever since. They have delayed the implementation of the employer mandate for businesses with fewer than 200 employees until 2016, and pushed open enrollment this fall for 2015 until mid-November – well after the midterm elections.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Colum...uctibles-Coming-November#sthash.XmkyRcMp.dpuf
Finally, you also simply ignoring the fact that despite the delay of the employer mandate and the inevitable price increase from that portion of the law, and despite the massive increase in deductibles, the ACA has seen increase in premiums - where the ACA was trumpeted as a means to reduce premiums - REDUCE, not increase.
“You should know that once we have fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now — which means your premiums will go down.”.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...24048f2-e245-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html
Further, the rallying cry for Bammycare was that it was absolutely necessary to provide insurance to the 30 million uninsured Americans. How is that working out? Not well at all, the data show. The ugly truth is that the large percentage of "new enrollees" in Bammycare are those who were previously covered under Medicaid, or their parents' plan, and that the actual number of "newly insured" is 7 million - or less than 25% of the uninsured population.
Hard Truth #1: The total number of uninsured has NOT declined by 9.5 million
Roughly 1 Million With Cancelled Plans Remain Uninsured. The problem with the first figure is that the LA Times itself reports “Fewer than a million people who had health plans in 2013 are now uninsured because their plans were canceled for not meeting new standards set by the law, the Rand survey indicates.”[1]This means we have to subtract this ~1 million newly uninsured group from the 9.5 million to arrive at the net reduction in uninsured of 8.5 million.
The Number of Previously Uninsured Young Adults Covered by Parents Half as Large as Reported. It was announced nearly 2 years ago that 3.1 million previously uninsured young adults age 19-25 had gained coverage as a consequence of the Obamacare mandate that parental plans cover such dependent “children.” This was based on an analysis of data from the National Health Interview Survey. However, there’s two other much larger surveys that both show much smaller declines: 1.8 million according to the American Community Survey (ACS)[2] and 1.4 million using the Current Population Survey (CPS).[3] I’m willing to split the difference and say that this feature of Obamacare reduced the number of uninsured young adults by 1.6 million, meaning the net reduction in uninsured across the entire population is 7.1 million.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapot...ring-the-uninsured-a-glass-half-empty-moment/
So, to sum up Bammycare thus far:
- We were told premiums would go down.
- They have not and instead have increased by more than 8%.
- That increase does not take into account the massively increased deductibles.
- The Bammy-mandated plans have deductibles of at least $2,500 for most new enrollees.
- Meanwhile, the tsunami of policy cancellations and rate increases were delayed in a cynical political move, so that Bammy could put off the day of reckoning until after the 2014 mid-terms.
- But that clock is ticking, and come November, 2015, Bammy's **** will hit the fan - and us.
- Further, the selling point was to insure the uninsured.
- However, more than 75% of the uninsured remain just that - uninsured.
- So we have deductible increases, rate increases, a pending explosion of employer cancellations come November of 2015, and 23 million uninsured.
- But hey, what are the chances the government ***** up this issue and we see cost overruns and lousy insurance?
