Apparently, premiums skyrocketing for Obamacare insurance plans is something new
The costs of Trump’s sabotage of Obamacare already are showing up in rate hikes
The easiest prediction to make about the healthcare business was that the efforts by Congress and the Trump Administration to sabotage the Affordable Care Act would produce a flood of rate hikes by insurers for 2018.
Oh, hey, remember when people predicted Ocare would be expensive, that people would lose their plans and doctors they liked, that premiums would spike and the deductibles would make the plans unusable? Or how about that the co-ops would collapse and that insurers would leave the Exchanges when they started losing money hand over fist? It wasn’t Republicans who voted for this, and it was Team Obama administering this turd of a law.
We are now standing on the edge of the water. Early rate requests have come in from insurers in five states, according to ace ACA-tracker Charles Gaba, who calculates the weighted average rate request increase in those states at about 30% (that is, weighted for the enrollment of each insurer).
Many are blaming the doubt and confusion sown by Congress and the White House for one-third or more of their requested increases over 2017 rates.
“Uncertainty is already clearly leading to significantly higher rate hike requests than would otherwise be asked for,†Gaba observes.
Well, certainly, you cannot discount that the uncertainty is doing that, but, the main culprit is that the system is set up to fail. What caused all those high rate hikes in the pre-Trump years once the Ocare insurance markets started?
The Trump effect includes continued uncertainty about whether the feds will make cost sharing reduction payments. These are subsidies payable directly to insurers that cover deductibles and co-pays for approximately 6 million families with incomes below 250% of the poverty line.
House Republicans have sued to stop the payments on grounds that the Affordable Care Act provided for the subsidies but didn’t appropriate funds for them. Trump hasn’t said whether he will continue the Obama policy of paying them until and unless a court decisively rules against them. Instead, he’s even threatened to withhold them as a bargaining chip to force Democrats to negotiate an Obamacare repeal.
So, it’s the fault of Trump and the GOP that the Democrats screwed up and forgot to create a funding method for those massive subsidies?
This continues on and on and on, in an article that is a thinly veiled opinion piece residing in the business section, where a rationale is manufactured to Blame Trump and Republicans for the fundamental failures built into Obamacare. Democrats are like kids who break a lamp then blame their sibling.
With control of both houses of Congress and the White House, the GOP is “it†on healthcare policy now. If the individual market collapse, they’ll get the blame.
It was designed to collapse. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Ocare was simply a means to move towards single payer, once that same market collapsed.
TEACH:
That’s simply not true. The ACA was a poor compromise, but the best available, and was opposed by almost every Republican and a few Dems from conservative districts. While it’s true that most progressives would prefer an efficient single payer, universal healthcare, that was not the intent of the ACA.
Ironically, the efforts of trump and the GOP to gut the ACA (and their even worse replacement – the horrible ACHA) will eventually lead to a Medicare-type universal healthcare that cons hate
with their hearts and souls. LOL, cons have neither hearts nor souls.Gruber… paging Jonathan Gruber…
No wonder the little poo flinging guy fawns over Ocare he is a pre-existing condition.
I love the way he says it was a “compromise”. There was nothing that the Reps could do and the bill was exactly what the Dems wanted. CRAP.
The rates aren’t going up because of uncertainty. They are going up because of certainty. The insurance companies know with certainty that their known costs exceed their current revenue projections. This is basic math.
A simple display of the basic economic truth “There no such thing as a free lunch”
Progressives support single payer, universal care. Why didn’t the Dems just enact it? They had to appease several more conservative Dems from Arkansas, Nebraska, WV, LA, ND.
The GOP could have enacted single payer with enthusiastic Dem support. Instead, since 2010 they have been working to cripple the ACA. Their recent ACHA is horrible, and hasn’t a chance to be enacted by the Senate. The American people want single payer, universal care. Conservative oppose it.