http://Big Increases Obamacare Premiums and Deductibles Coming November
FTA:
There is more in the article, it is interesting how this thing keeps getting worse and worse.
My mother needs her pacemaker leads change, they wheeled her in to the operating room and got everything ready, then the doctor came in and called off the surgery because the "new" policy my mother has, says it can't be done until 2015.
I have a friend who is a truck driver, he went to the doctor to get his CDL physical. The doctor wants to do a CTScan before giving him the okay. The issue is, he had a CTScan in October and his knew policy allows only one per year. So, he needs to shell out $4000 to get a CTScan. So, he can no longer work, and is now unemployed.
Coverage worse, costs going up. More people not covered, the economic impact will not hit until 2015 when the employer mandate goes into effect and that will hurt us, otherwise Obama would not have delayed it until after the midterm elections.
FTA:
The Obama administration postponed a portion of the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act in order to avoid paying the political consequences of a market disruption in the group insurance sector. If new premium pricing proposals from insurer filings in the states of Virginia and Washington come to pass, the White House may have no way out of accountability for their health-care reform folly.
When Obamacare first rolled out last fall, the failure of the federal and state exchanges were only the first signs of disaster. Premiums spiked upward in both the individual and group markets, and insurers raised deductibles and narrowed provider networks to save themselves money. Millions of people lost their existing insurance plans in the individual market, and many ended up in plans that either didnt fit or cost far more than they spent in the past.
The laws supporters claim that the higher prices result from better coverage, but that depends on ones perspective. The main point of Obamacare was to provide insurance to the uninsured, but the enrollment numbers showed that precious few of those actually gained coverage. The White House announcement of 8 million enrollees turned out to be more like 6.65 million when discounting those who hadnt paid their first premium, just barely above the estimated 5-6 million who lost their existing plans after the coverage mandates were imposed.
The numbers get worse when looking at how many of these enrollees were previously uninsured. Earlier estimates put that number at around a third, but a new study from the McKinsey Center for US Health System Reform pegs the number lower at 26 percent. When filtering out those who have paid their premium, the number drops to 22 percent of the administrations claimed enrollees, or about 1.7 million people.
Most of the individual-market enrollments were simply churn created by the market disruption of Obamacare itself. Those enrollments barely made a dent in the claimed numbers of the uninsured, estimates of which range between 30-40 million.
Now that insurers have seen the composition of their new risk pools under Obamacare, they have to calculate their new pricing levels for state and federal regulators. The pricing jump for 2014 was more speculative, based on the presumed demographic composition of incoming enrollees. The pricing proposals from Virginia and Washington indicate that the new enrollments made the risk pools riskier than first thought.
Rate-proposal filings in the state of Washington show the four largest insurers proposing average increases across their plans ranging from 8.1 percent to 11.2 percent in a single year. Jonathan Wu of Value Penguin analyzed the proposals and concluded that the insurers tried betting on success, and came up short. What is troubling about the data is that among these insurers, there is clearly an issue with the premiums offered in the first enrollment period, Wu writes. Noting that the four companies offered the lowest prices in the market this year, their enrollment numbers are not surprising, but their consumers may get a less-pleasant surprise by the end of the year.
- See more at: Big Increases in Obamacare Premiums and Deductibles Coming in November | The Fiscal Times numbers get worse when looking at how many of these enrollees were previously uninsured. Earlier estimates put that number at around a third, but a new study from the McKinsey Center for US Health System Reform pegs the number lower at 26 percent. When filtering out those who have paid their premium, the number drops to 22 percent of the administrations claimed enrollees, or about 1.7 million people.
Most of the individual-market enrollments were simply churn created by the market disruption of Obamacare itself. Those enrollments barely made a dent in the claimed numbers of the uninsured, estimates of which range between 30-40 million.
Now that insurers have seen the composition of their new risk pools under Obamacare, they have to calculate their new pricing levels for state and federal regulators. The pricing jump for 2014 was more speculative, based on the presumed demographic composition of incoming enrollees. The pricing proposals from Virginia and Washington indicate that the new enrollments made the risk pools riskier than first thought.
Rate-proposal filings in the state of Washington show the four largest insurers proposing average increases across their plans ranging from 8.1 percent to 11.2 percent in a single year. Jonathan Wu of Value Penguin analyzed the proposals and concluded that the insurers tried betting on success, and came up short. What is troubling about the data is that among these insurers, there is clearly an issue with the premiums offered in the first enrollment period, Wu writes. Noting that the four companies offered the lowest prices in the market this year, their enrollment numbers are not surprising, but their consumers may get a less-pleasant surprise by the end of the year.
There is more in the article, it is interesting how this thing keeps getting worse and worse.
My mother needs her pacemaker leads change, they wheeled her in to the operating room and got everything ready, then the doctor came in and called off the surgery because the "new" policy my mother has, says it can't be done until 2015.
I have a friend who is a truck driver, he went to the doctor to get his CDL physical. The doctor wants to do a CTScan before giving him the okay. The issue is, he had a CTScan in October and his knew policy allows only one per year. So, he needs to shell out $4000 to get a CTScan. So, he can no longer work, and is now unemployed.
Coverage worse, costs going up. More people not covered, the economic impact will not hit until 2015 when the employer mandate goes into effect and that will hurt us, otherwise Obama would not have delayed it until after the midterm elections.