Free Republic

HONOLULU – State Insurance Commissioner Gordon Ito today issued the following statement regarding HMSA’s request filed with the Insurance Division to raise premiums for individual Affordable Care Act (ACA) health plans for 2016: “This is the highest premium increase ever requested by HMSA. The requested increase for an average of 49.1 percent for the ACA individual plan will be closely scrutinized. “The Insurance Division will actively seek reductions to the proposed request, where possible, to ensure fairness to all parties involved. “If medical expenditures paid out for healthcare services under the ACA individual plan are too high, the division’s ability...

Insurers are planning double-digit rate hikes ahead of Obamacare’s third year, eliciting a told-you-so outcry from the law’s opponents who said the health law is to blame for boosting the price of care and forcing those costs onto consumers. A major insurer in New Mexico is seeking a 50-percent rate increase for 2016, one in Tennessee wants to raise its premiums for a mid-level silver plan by 36 percent, and proposed hikes in Illinois range from about 13 percent to well above 30 percent in some cases, according to data published this week. The figures, posted on the federal HealthCare.gov...

Affordable! ObamaCare rate hikes range from 30-to-50 percent in 2016If you don’t recognize there’s something inherently cockeyed about the federal government passing a law that presumes to make a product or service “affordable,” then you don’t understand how market forces work. I’ll oversimplify it for the purpose of brevity: Providers have to price a product or service in a way that reflects the cost of providing it, as well as the level of demand for it, because if they don’t they will soon find themselves incapable of meeting the demand. The premium rates announced when ObamaCare went into effect were...

Five years after the passage of ObamaCare, there is one expense that’s still causing sticker shock across the healthcare industry: overhead costs. The administrative costs for healthcare plans are expected to explode by more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade, according to a new study published by the Health Affairs blog. The $270 billion in new costs, for both private insurance companies and government programs, will be “over and above what would have been expected had the law not been enacted,” one of the authors, David Himmelstein, wrote Wednesday. Those costs will be particularly high...

Citing higher-than-expected costs, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico wants to raise premiums by an average of 51.6 percent on individual Affordable Care Act plans in 2016. The company made the request in a preliminary rate proposal filed with New Mexico Insurance Superintendent John Franchini. Blue Cross and Blue Shield – which insures an estimated 600,000 people statewide – said the proposal affects an estimated 35,000 customers who signed up for qualified individual health plans through the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange, but also those who bought the same plans off the exchange. Franchini has the final authority...

Health Reform: Looks like ObamaCare premiums will skyrocket for many next year. So what do Democrats propose? New insurance mandates that will drive premiums up even higher. Which one is the stupid party again?

The “Affordable” Care Act may be looking for a new name in the near future. As Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are reporting, the next round of health care premium cost adjustments are coming down the pike, and you’ll never guess where things are heading. Okay… you probably guessed already. The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Obamacare rates are about to shoot up, in some cases as much as 40%. The rate increases requested by insurance carriers vary state by state, but the overall picture is bad.“In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp....

President Obama has talked a lot in recent months about how health care inflation has moderated in recent years, and he always manages to credit ObamaCare for the result. But there is rampant inflation in one part of the health care system, and ironically enough it involves ObamaCare premiums.

Roberta and Curtis Campbell typically look forward to tax time. Most years, they receive a refund – a little extra cash to pay off credit card bills. But this year the California couple got a shock: According to their tax preparer, they owe the IRS more than $6,000. That’s the money the Campbells received from the federal government last year to make their Obamacare health coverage more affordable. Roberta, unemployed when she signed up for the plan, got a job halfway through the year and Curtis found full-time work. The couple’s total yearly income became too high to qualify for...

**SNIP** Given that the authors of Obamacare had a very specific idea in mind for what constitutes affordable insurance, the American Health Policy Institute is out with a new study that asks a very interesting question: Does Obamacare meet its own standards for affordability? The answer is no. Here are a couple of the key findings from AHPI's study: Even now, under the Affordable Care Act’s own definition, over 105 million Americans will find plans in the ACA’s [Affordable Care Act's] public exchanges to be “unaffordable” when both premiums and deductibles are taken into account. Over 13 million employees with...

When it became obvious a couple of years ago that Obamacare would accelerate health care inflation, the law’s boosters began claiming that cost control was never its primary goal. PPACA’s promoters had previously promised that it would reduce annual health care expenses by $2,500 per family while improving access and quality of care. But the facts forced them to abandon that pledge and adopt a safer party line. As expressed by the New York Times, the new story goes thus: “At its most basic level, the Affordable Care Act was intended to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance.”...

Although the Affordable Care Act has not led to soaring insurance costs, as many critics claimed it would, the law hasn't provided much relief to American workers either, according to a new study of employer-provided health benefits. Workers continue to be squeezed by rising insurance costs, eroding benefits and stagnant wages, the report from the nonproNationwide, the average contribution an employee made to an insurance premium in 2013 and the average deductible together represented 9.6% of the median income of American households with members under age 65. That is up from 8.4% in 2010 and nearly double the 5.3% that...

Obamacare is going to kill you. Or one of your kids. Or one of your parents. Someone in your family is going to die from Obamacare. You can bet on it. You can bet your life on it. There are many things in medicine that are in a state of flux because of Obamacare. Obamacare is the name given to the most inappropriately termed "Affordable Care Act." There is nothing about Obamacare that makes care affordable. Obamacare has made care much more unaffordable. What it has done is make healthcare appear to be affordable because of subsidized premiums. The problem...

link only: http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/nation/2015/01/01/middle-class-workers-struggle-to-pay-for-care-despite-insurance/19841235/

County officials are starting to feel the pain of Obamacare. The Board of Commissioners has learned the various fees levied on large employers by the Affordable Care Act will cost the county nearly $1.5 million for 2014. In a memo to the commissioners, county Risk and Insurance Manager John Anderson said the fees are based on the county’s nearly 3,000 full-time employees who receive health care benefits. The largest cost, by far, is a 2.5 percent fee tacked onto health insurance premiums to help pay for the ACA’s online insurance exchanges and overall implementation costs. The first year price tag:...

The administration is trying to preempt Obamacare sticker shock in 2015 by pleading with Americans to shop around in the marketplaces instead of automatically re-enrolling in the health plans they chose last year. Officials said Thursday those who don’t look around and compare plans during open enrollment could see their costs rise because the so-called benchmark plans are more expensive this year.But the Health and Human Services Department said there are more insurers offering more plans this year, meaning that in most states consumers can choose from three or more issuers. And HHS said those options mean most consumers who...

Americans are inveterate tinkerers — a trait commented on by observers from de Tocqueville to Winston Churchill. That’s why it’s not surprising that the bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would want to keep tweaking Obamacare. Mind you, it’s not so much because they think they can perfect the law. Rather, they keep tweaking the law in order to keep the American people from brandishing pitchforks and coming to Washington to tar and feather them and ride them out of town on a rail. Self-preservation can be a marvelous motivating factor. The geniuses who brought us the...

Many of the 7 million consumers who got insurance under President Barack Obama's health care law will see their premiums rise next year unless they switch to another plan, independent analysts said as the government released details Friday. The Health and Human Services department released a massive computer file of 2015 premiums one day ahead of the start of open enrollment. Those numbers will take time to fully analyze. ,,,,, But there is a catch if you are already a customer: Your plan may no longer be the lost-cost benchmark in your community. In that case, you'll pay more unless...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday unveiled data showing that many Americans with health insurance bought under the Affordable Care Act could face substantial price increases next year — in some cases as much as 20 percent — unless they switch plans. The data became available just hours before the health insurance marketplace was to open to buyers seeking insurance for 2015. An analysis of the data by The New York Times suggests that although consumers will often be able to find new health plans with prices comparable to those they now pay, the situation varies greatly from state...

A third video has surfaced of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber bragging about pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public in order to help implement Obamacare. “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during a speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2012. He was discussing what is known as the Cadillac tax and how it came into being.