Insurance Rates to Jump Even More!
According to a WSJ article, “major insurers in some states are proposing hefty rate boosts for plans sold under the federal health law”. The UNAFFORDABLE care act strikes again.
- In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016.
- The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase.
- In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products.
- Moda Health, the largest insurer on the Oregon health exchange, seeks an average boost of around 25%.
- Anthem Inc., in Virginia, wants an average increase of 13.2%.
- Blue Care Network, part of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, applied for a 10% average increase.
The reason for this increase? “All of them cite high medical costs incurred by people newly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act.”
- Insurers say their proposed rates reflect the revenue they need to pay claims, now that they have had time to analyze their experience with the law’s requirement that they offer the same rates to everyone—regardless of medical history.
I call bullshit on this. Most of these newly enrolled people are healthy and young forced to buy insurance. They make the insurance money and cost nothing. What is disgusting about these increases, though, is that more and more people are being stuck with higher out-of-pocket costs due to the high deductibles. These things didn’t even exist a decade ago.
This is another example of how the insurance companies are in charge of the healthcare system. And you can’t even walk away because Obamacare made it the law of the land to be handcuffed to these greedy bastards. The article goes on to say that the states will fight these increases but it is all a game. The insurers ask for more than they want and then the state cuts a deal and brags about how they kept the insurers at bay. It’s embarrassing but you will see the headlines your local paper soon. Don’t fall for it.
Oh but the Obama care was going to prevent these 20% rate hikes. LOL
As a retired small business owner I rode on the health insurance industry carousel. They would suck your group in with low teaser rates for a few months then jack up the premium by 40-60% if your group was too old. I would then have to shop for another teaser rate. When my older employees retired I was able to drop insurance as the younger employees didn’t require it.
The patient needs medical care from a competent doctor and support system. I appreciate the need for medical infrastructure and rational oversight to protect patients from their own ignorance and from charlatans. Licensing and regulation hopefully provide this as does the FDA protects us from snake oil drugs.
What useful function does the Insurance industry provide? They transfer $$ from the patients and government to providers while trying to keep as much as they can for themselves. Their success is determined by how well they can avoid having patients who have high needs. I would rather have Medicare lower the eligibility age from 65 years to 65 microseconds.
That might be called Single Payer Insurance
Eugene, you make some excellent points, and I am not so blind as to claim the market could/would solve all these ills. That said, insurance companies cannot fine or imprison doctors (well, not yet), cannot forcibly enter their homes or offices, and do not have their edicts backed up with guns. Medicare and Medicaid are, whatever good they may be seen to provide, are manifestations of government-sanctioned force. No recitation of insurance company misdeeds changes the fact that putting government fully in charge will make things worse.
Once in my former career I naval aviation, our squadron’s quarterly fuel consumption was under that predicted, and it was feared we would get a smaller allotment the next quarter. So the orders were to fill up several planes with expensive jet fuel, fly out over the ocean, dump it, and return to repeat the process. And consider, the military is far and away the most disciplined, efficient branch of the federal government. A single-payer system would bring this sort of waste, the economics of ethanol subsidies, the unaccountability of the Dept. of Education, to those small remnants of health care not already thoroughly corrupted by federal retardation. Oh I do think it is inevitable, I just hope everyone is truly prepared for what they will get.
Once again we should listen to W. C when he said:
” You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else”
I am still wondering how insurance companies managed to segue from a non-profit to a profit model. There is no justification for the multimillion dollar salaries of the CEOs. It is unfortunate that Congress couldn’t get its act together enough to hammer out a workable health care system which would model the insurance companies on the utility companies and limit their profits. The utility companies, with their limited profits, seem to be doing very well, despite the fact that, unlike the insurance companies, they have to lay aside funds for infrastructure.
I am an anti-Obama person who was against the ACA except for one thing–I felt it was a good thing that health insurance would be available to the unemployed and not tied to an employer. Why should health care have anything to do with a person’s employer? If you change employers you have to change your health care and the next plan offered by the new employer might be more expensive and you pay part of it, or might not include benefits you had and need from your previous employer. And you aren’t always in charge of what you get–if you work for a big corporation, you may have choices but a small business has a specific plan that everybody gets if they choose, take it or leave it. Life insurance isn’t tied to an employer–why is health insurance? But aside from that, I could see that this was going to be a problem with Medicaid for doctors, patients, government, and taxpayers, so I was against it.
Then I ended up benefitting from the ACA. I got ovarian cancer and haven’t been able to get a remission! Just stable disease but too immunosuppressed to work. I had to sell my veterinary practice. So now I was unemployed but not impoverished, and needed high quality health care, not Medicaid. Being able to choose my own level of insurance policy and just sign up for a good one was easy and available regardless of employment. I am one of the exceptions, I guess, but it has been great for me.
The business of American health insurance is sweet. The income payments are compulsory, but the outflow payments are optional. The benefit to the government is the “stabilization of financial markets” – this gig keeps the stock market high due to unspent capital that the insurance companies reinvest in stocks.
The whole fandango is based on the premise that the Dow Jones somehow measures the American Economy, which it does not – no more than the inevitable increase in the price of houses that took place from after WWII to 2008. That was a bubble, like Tech was a bubble in 2000. Bubbles feel good, but do nothing to generate actual productive capital. We don’t do that any more in America, so we have to grift money from the homies in clever ways.
In thriving cultures, an educated workforce is in high demand. Here, the dollar-added value of a college education has plunged below the so-so level. Even the high school diploma is of dubious worth in obtaining a job. Sound like a thriving financial culture to anyone?
Can’t get a job that offers health insurance? Fine. The Magic Fairy of government offers health insurance – that looks more and more like taxation, less and less like a benefit. If you’re lucky to afford one.
It’s clear now that the main benefit of ObamaCare was Medicaid expansion, and for those patients the act was a godsend. The trouble is that the ACA was supposed to be more than just Medicaid expansion. The people falling through the cracks under ObamaCare are the same people who fell through the cracks before, namely lower middle class working people who have to decide between going uninsured and paying a penalty vs buying expensive crappy ObamaCare insurance.
It’s always irritating to hear people defend the ACA but criticize insurance companies, because they are the SAME THING.