ObamaCare was from the beginning designed to destroy the private health insurance market and force all Americans into government-run, single-payer socialized medicine. But to anesthetize the American people from what was being done to them, all the "goodies" were front-loaded, and the inevitable skyrocketing premiums and costs had temporary built-in mitigating factors to conceal the full scale horror of O-Care's ultimate endgame from a public that never wanted it in the first place but were imperiously ignored by their Democrat overlords. The latter factor, of course, made irrelevant by that same electorate delivering Barack Obama a second term, rendering the Unaffordable Care Act functionally irrepealable.
The "sticker shock" of skyrocketing premiums has been with us for almost two years. Now cometh the removal of the temporary mitigating factors:
According to the rate requests posted on Healthcare.gov, nearly every State has multiple plans that are facing a more than 10% premium increase. Many plans — including some offered by State-market leaders—could see hikes of more than 30%, 40% or even 50%. Though most of these requests have not been approved, nor have all of the rate hikes that are less than 10% been unveiled, it is undeniable that millions of Americans are facing double-digit premium increases for health insurance next year.
For the first time since the law went into effect three years ago, insurers are basing their rate-hike requests on more than a year of data. For 2014 plans, they had to make educated guesses on how to price their never-before-sold UCA-compliant plans. For 2015 estimates, insurers had about six months of information to work with, and the final average premium increase was 5.4%. Now that insurers have a more complete picture, it is clear that costs are increasing much faster than anticipated.
It’s only going to get worse after 2016, as I’ve written in these pages, when two de facto bailouts for insurance companies expire. Through “risk corridors,” taxpayers are on the hook for patients who spend more on health care than insurers predicted. Through “reinsurance,” taxpayers are heavily subsidizing the most-expensive patients — those who make more than $70,000 in claims in 2015. Thanks to these two programs, insurance companies are able to artificially lower their premiums for consumers—by between 10%-15% in 2014, according to CMS — while charging the taxpayer for their losses. Reinsurance alone cost taxpayers $7.9 billion in 2014.
But consumers will pick up that tab once these programs disappear at the end of 2016. Health insurers are aware of this fact, and it’s in their interest to avoid the negative attention — and angry customers — that dramatic premium increases will cause. They thus have an incentive to spread out the coming hikes over both 2016 and 2017, rather than confine them to next year.....
By 2023, I estimate that the average family plan could be 61% more expensive than it is in 2015, with individual plans only one or two percentage points behind. These increases are so high that direct taxpayer subsidies to consumers are unlikely to keep up. So the cost, both financially and politically, will become increasingly intolerable. [emphases added]
And remember, that 2015 baseline comes on top of the double-digit percentage increases of the past two years, meaning that ObamaCare has vastly "bent the cost curve" UPWARDS already. Within a decade, health insurance premiums will be double or triple the levels they were prior to 2010, when those comparative bargains were cited by Democrats as the "outrage" that HAD to be "fixed" via the Unaffordable Care Act. And there will be no more "backstops" and no more subsidies. It will all come out of the pockets of thee and me.
Why do I not mention employers? Because they will either drop health insurance coverage as a fringe benefit - which the UCA probably already forbids - and/or they will cut back on payrolls and layoff millions more Americans in an effort to stay in business at all. The Obama Depression will deepen (something that scarcely seems possible), even the Regime's cooked U3 unemployment rate will return to double-digits, federal and State tax receipts will plummet, annual federal deficits will return to ten figures and beyond, the federal debt will spiral upwards even faster, default will become inevitable....
Hey, when I employ the term "death spiral," I'm not talking about just private health insurance carriers.
Oh, and did I mention that deductibles - which are supposed to be inversely proportional to premium rates - are exploding in tandem with them instead?:
The Obama administration hasn’t done any better in its other goal of driving the cost of care down for American families. Even Slate wondered last week just when the Democrats would start taking ownership of “skyrocketing premiums” in the third enrollment year of the {Una]ffordable Care Act. Oregon approved a 25% increase from its largest health insurer, and a 33% increase from the next largest. BlueCross BlueShield in Tennessee needs a 36% increase after getting a 19% increase the year before. In my State of Minnesota, BCBS wants to hike rates 54%, and 51.6% in New Mexico.
At the same time, deductibles have also skyrocketed, leaving people with higher monthly payments and even less ability to access the insurance that those premiums provide. Slate’s Helaine Olen heaps scorn on ObamaCare opponents and fails to admit that their predictions of spiraling costs have come true, but she does admit that the system does not work at controlling costs – the most significant reason to have government overhaul the health-insurance system in the first place.
Of course not. Because...well, to quote the late Milton Friedman, "If the socialists took over the Sahara Desert, there would soon be a shortage of sand". At its core, liberalism/socialism/communism is about control - of the people, including their economic activities. Government control and suppression of formerly free markets contracts the supply side of the supply and demand curves, reducing the supply of all goods and services, dramatically increasing their prices throughout the supply distribution chain. Whereas at the same time the political aspect of promising those same commodities as now being "free" to consumers produces a simultaneous surge in demand, which also produces a dizzying upward spike in prices. The result is either runaway hyperinflation and currency (followed by economic) collapse, or government-imposed price controls far below where the market would set them, leading to crippling shortages and....mass public impoverishment and dependency, enhancing government....control and accompanying despotic power.
Or, the endgame of ObamaCare. Don't ever tell me that leftwingnuts don't understand economics. They know it better than the vast majority of Americans who keep idiotically electing these tyrants.
Which brings us to Captain Ed's peroration:
What have we accomplished in the last five years since the passage of ObamaCare? We still have roughly the same number of uninsured, [over]estimated to be roughly thirty million people....Costs for the insured are skyrocketing, however, and many of the newly insured will find that high deductibles mean they will still have to fund their routine care out of pocket. Provider networks have narrowed considerably, making access even more difficult than before. Emergency room visits for routine care have actually increased. The bureaucracy that runs all of this cannot fix its fraud problem, not even after having it specifically pointed out to them by the GAO and given a year to resolve.
There’s no fixing a structure doomed to failure. The only option is to repeal it and introduce market-based reforms that eliminate price-signal opacity, especially in routine care.
If only we could, Ed, if only we could.
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