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According to the New York Times, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota requested rate increases averaging about 50 percent for 2016, and a vice president there said his company had not seen an improvement in the health status of new customers. “WASHINGTON — Hoping to avoid another political uproar over the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration is trying to persuade states to cut back big rate increases requested by many health insurance companies for 2016…” Read the NYT article

As leading health insurers scramble for market share through a series of multibillion-dollar mergers, consumers are no doubt wondering if their premiums are bound to skyrocket. Short answer: Probably. Ironically, Obamacare had anticipated the negative effects of runaway capitalism with a safeguard that critics branded as socialism — the so-called public option, a government-run insurance plan offered alongside private plans. Thanks to business and ideological interests triumphing over economic considerations, a public option fell by the wayside. Some experts say that, with fewer private insurers and rising rates, we're going to regret not having a public option as part of...

Let me start by saying this is not a political screed against Obamacare; I’m thrilled that some 18 million Americans now have health insurance who didn’t before the law took effect, lowering the percentage of uninsured adults from 18% in 2013 to 11.9% today. But I’m growing concerned that for some people — especially older, middle- and lower-income adults — the Affordable Care Act is becoming The Unaffordable Care Act. A Growing Problem: The Underinsured Several recent studies suggest to me that due to a combination of Obamacare’s incentives to reduce premiums; the rise of so-called “consumer-driven” and high-deductible health...

They wanted their Obamacare prices to be low—but the state said "no." The state of Oregon reportedly has ordered a number of insurers to raise proposed Obamacare premiums for 2016 after some of those companies asked for rates that were only moderately higher, if not lower than this year. Now, many Obamacare customers there are looking at likely double-digit percentage rate increases after having experienced some of "the lowest premiums in the nation," the Oregonian noted. For example, Oregon's Health CO-OP asked for a 5.3-percent average rate increase for next year, but the state's preliminary decision calls for a 19.9...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Alabama health insurance providers who offer plans on the ObamaCare exchange are seeking significant price increases this year, after healthcare costs took a sharp upward turn. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama is reportedly requesting an average of a 28 percent increase for its individual plans, as well as a 73 percent increase for its platinum plan. Small group plans could also increase by nearly 14 percent. UnitedHealthcare is seeking a 24.5 percent increase for its 2016 rates.

Hold onto your wallets ... many insurers want to substantially hike rates on Obamacare policies for 2016. Many are proposing double-digit premium increases for individual policies, with some companies looking to boost rates more than 60%, according to a list posted Monday by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Insurers say they want to hike rates because enrollees are going to the doctor, getting lab work and filling prescriptions more than they had originally anticipated. "We've seen a great pent-up demand for services," said Aaron Billger, spokesman for Highmark, a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee offering plans in...

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/