Another Round of Insurance Price Hikes Coming
Per the AMA Morning Rounds report about an AP article:
..as health insurance companies prepare for next year, “early moves…suggest” customers will see “another round of price hikes and limited choices” in policies offered on the marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act. While “price increase requests are only just starting to be revealed,” state authorities in Virginia and Maryland said requests for increases range from “just under 10 percent to more than 50 percent.” One reason suggested for price increases is “evaporating competition” because it is expected that for next year, “more than 40 percent of U.S. counties would have only one insurer” offering policies through the ACA marketplaces.
Here are my questions:
- Why do we believe insurance companies? They pretend they are your healthcare givers. They are not. Doctors and nurses and other medical staff are.
- Why do we let insurance companies stop competition from getting into the market to bring prices down?
- Why do we not go crazy every time we see this crap being announced? They are reaping massive profits. Their CEOs make unbelievable amounts of money. All this and they stick us with the bill.
- Why are we letting them control the whole market? You would think I support a government or single-payer system. I do not! I do not want the gov’t screwing things up even more. I want a free market system. A real one that brings prices down.
Insurance across state lines won’t work. No small or local insurance companies will spend the money and effort to contract networks in every state. Even if they did, your insurance prices wouldn’t change, since they are based upon the cost of care in your geographic area. In general, insurance profit margins range from 2.5% to 3.5%, some of the lowest relative to all other industry. Health insurance is expensive because healthcare is expensive, and health care is expensive, because we use third parties to pay for it. Health insurance should be reserved only for catastrophe. Alll other healthcare should be paid for directly by the consumer. Only then will health care and thus health insurance become affordable.
What gets me is the people (even some doctors) who say the trouble isn’t Obamacare, it’s the insurance companies. Well, Obamacare IS insurance companies, you can’t separate them out. The foxes were put in charge of the hen house.
Competition across state lines now!!
There has never been a healthcare system merger that I am aware of that brought lower prices to consumers- such mergers have only been good for the executives that broker the deal. I fear allowing across state line competition between health insures would result in the same merger mania with the same result of larger monopolies and even higher prices.