Healthcare

Report: Insurance Premiums Could Increase By 95 Percent in 3 Years

Written by SK Ashby

That's what California's insurance marketplace says.

A combination of factors mostly stemming from Republican meddling are expected to increase health insurance premium by anywhere from 35 to 95(!) percent over the next three years depending on which state you live in.

And here's the not-at-all funny but still amusing part: the most "catastrophic" increases will be seen in states that voted for Trump.

The nationwide analysis, issued Thursday by California’s insurance marketplace, finds wide variations state to state, with a broad swath of the South and parts of the Midwest in danger of what the report calls “catastrophic” average rate increases by 2021.

According to the analysis, the largest single impact will come from eliminating, starting in 2019, the ACA’s penalty for Americans who violate the law’s requirement that most people in the United States carry health coverage. That change alone, part of a massive tax bill Congress adopted in December, can be expected to increase premiums by 7 to 15 percent next year, depending on the state, and as much as 10 percent each of the following two years. [...]

“The effect is going to be: The individual market will be poor people who get subsidies and sick people who buy no matter what,” said Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California, a state-run ACA marketplace that sponsored the analysis. “And the middle class will be priced out of insurance in about a third of America.”

The creation of an alternative health care system in America is certainly not inevitable even if the worst projections come true, but it seems to me Republicans are making alternatives such as an expanded Medicaid or "Medicare for all" program the only plausible solution.

Republicans could have cooperated and passed legislation aimed at stabilizing the market, lowering premiums, and securing access to private health insurance for many years to come, but I think they've blown it. They've made a public option the only politically plausible option.

Even if it's proposed with the best intentions, I'm skeptical that the electorate will entertain any future campaign to patch our private health insurance system. By that point, it may even be too late if premiums have already increased by 95 percent or more.

Short of completely dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have done everything they can to roll back time to put the nation in the same position we were in a decade ago if not worse.

Major companies like Amazon and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway have partnered to create their own administrator for employees because the cost of health care is strangling the economy and it's only going to get worse.