Most Americans aren’t aware of it but today is a big day for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Today is the deadline for insurers to report what they will charge on the PPACA’s insurance exchanges next year. Spoiler alert: it will be more than last year, in some cases significantly more. This passage from Sally Pipes’s post on the event at RealClearHealth caught my eye:
Obamacare’s defenders — and insurers themselves — have attributed these rate hikes to the “uncertainty” Republicans have injected into the marketplace. First with their on-again, off-again effort to repeal the law, and second with their indecision about ending the law’s Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies.
But a new analysis of premium data from the past four years provides evidence that two regulations at the heart of Obamacare are largely to blame for years of rate hikes. Those regulations are the law’s guarantee of coverage to all and its requirement that insurers charge the same premium to all people of the same age, regardless of health status or history.
The analysis was conducted by McKinsey for the Department of Health and Human Services. The consulting firm looked at rate hikes in four states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee. Premiums in each had doubled or tripled since 2013 — the year before Obamacare went into effect.
Now for the those of you who don’t follow this issue closely, those two regulations have buzzwords attached to them: “guaranteed issue” and “community rating”. And they’re the very heart of the PPACA. They’re the steak.
If true, that would mean that the main problem with the PPACA is the PPACA. Said another way, the claim that the PPACA was just the slow motion withdrawal of insurance companies from the individual health care market may well have been right.
Some will see that as a bug and others a feature.
Republican plans to maybe end the Cost Sharing Reduction Subsidies are certainly not doing any good for ObamaCare exchanges — it’s a large added risk for insurers.
It’s also bad policy if one’s goal is to let ObamaCare implode, and one believes that the collapse will be due to the core functions of ObamaCare. It muddies the waters, and leaves proponents of the law in a position where they have a plausible claim that the law was working before it was sabotaged — and it means that it will be propped up again the next time the Democrats have the power to do so.
It would be better to fund it fully, and then let ObamaCare collapse, so it won’t be brought back again.
Of course, that’s *if* one believes ObamaCare will collapse of its own devices and one wants to get rid of it.
Would like to see that data before I believe in the tripling claims. Overall, rates slowed initially.
Steve
That’s why I wrote “if true”. Everybody has an ax to grind.