Tag: premiums

How to get Obamacare supporters upset about Obamacare: personally inconvenience them.

So, let me get this straight.  Ms. Pineman (the subject of this New York Times article) is a loyal Obama voter and Obamacare supporter.  So, she accepted the following:

  • That her plan – which she liked – would go away.  Despite being told – explicitly – that if she liked her plan, she could keep her plan.
  • That her new plan would not pay for her favored doctor.  Despite being told – explicitly – that if she liked her doctor, she could keep her doctor.
  • That her premiums would be going up.  Despite being told – explicitly – that her costs would go down.
  • That her networks would shrink.  Despite being told – explicitly – that the quality of her coverage would not suffer.
  • That her co-pay for an emergency room visit went through the roof. No explicit promise that I can remember on this one, but it’s always fun to watch an Obamacare supporter discover this particular wrinkle.

Continue reading How to get Obamacare supporters upset about Obamacare: personally inconvenience them.

WSJ looks for good news on rising Obamacare premiums, fails to really find any.

Watch the spin!

In the first look at how insurers plan to adjust prices in the second year under the federal health-care law, filings from Virginia carriers show they are opting for premium increases in 2015 that will pinch consumers’ pocketbooks but fall short of some bigger rate predictions.

The new premium proposals, detailed in official filings to the state’s insurance regulator, show health plans all opting for some increases.

The filings show insurers’ planned increases easily outpacing broader U.S. inflation, but shy of the much larger boosts some critics predicted.

Continue reading WSJ looks for good news on rising Obamacare premiums, fails to really find any.

Get ready for #obamacare premium increases. Or possibly ‘brace for impact.’

Let’s look at these three excerpts from a Hill article on likely Obamacare premium hikes.

  • “The insurance official, who hails from a populous swing state, said his company expects to triple its rates next year on the ObamaCare exchange.”
  • “In Iowa, which hosts the first presidential caucus in the nation and has a competitive Senate race this year, rates are expected to rise 100 percent on the exchange and by double digits on the larger, employer-based market, according to a recent article in the Business Record.”
  • “Jon Gruber, who also helped design the Affordable Care Act, said, “The bottom line is that we just don’t know. Premiums were rising 7 to 10 percent a year before the law. So the question is whether we will see a continuation of that sort of single digit increase, as Sebelius said, or whether it will be larger.””

Continue reading Get ready for #obamacare premium increases. Or possibly ‘brace for impact.’

Barack Obama’s #Obamacare Obamabubble, in under 140 characters.

To quote the physicists: this… is not even wrong.

 

Continue reading Barack Obama’s #Obamacare Obamabubble, in under 140 characters.

CBS: Obama administration is lowballing reported minimum #obamacare costs.

Well, the administration is kind of f*cked now.

CBS News has uncovered a serious pricing problem with HealthCare.gov. It stems from the Obama administration’s efforts to improve its health care website. A new online feature can dramatically underestimate the cost of insurance.

[snip]

Industry analysts, such as Jonathan Wu, point to how the website lumps people only into two broad categories: “49 or under” and “50 or older.”

Wu said it’s “incredibly misleading for people that are trying to get a sense of what they’re paying.”

Prices for everyone in the 49-or-under group are based on what a 27-year-old would pay. In the 50-or-older group, prices are based on what a 50-year-old would pay.

Continue reading CBS: Obama administration is lowballing reported minimum #obamacare costs.

Quote of the Day, Embrace The Healing Power Of “And,” Brother @charlescwcooke edition.

Charles C.W. Cooke, in the process of pointing out that Obamacare was sold to us as a money-saver – and that the Left is now apparently stupid enough to think that we’re stupid enough not to have noticed – writes:

[Barack Obama’s] central claim [in 2008] — that premiums would drop for the typical family by $2,500 — could literally have been taken from the back of an envelope. As the New York Times explained back in 2008, the $2,500 number came from economist David Cutler, who predicted that Obamacare would reduce all health-care spending by $200 billion a year. Candidate Obama, looking for a good sound bite, simply divided this number by the number of families in the United States; then, calculating inexplicably that total health-care spending and family health-insurance premiums were exactly the same thing, he concluded that all money saved would be returned to the people. That Obama considered this a reasonable way of selling a plan that reorganized one-sixth of the economy betrays either a fundamental economic illiteracy or a deeply troubling readiness to mislead.

Continue reading Quote of the Day, Embrace The Healing Power Of “And,” Brother @charlescwcooke edition.

The Cold Equations of #Obamacare: $1,260 > $95.

Why are these two numbers relevant?

  • $1,260 is the minimum – the minimum – “insurance premiums for the lowest-cost ‘bronze’ plan for a 27-year-old single person… in 36 states where the federal government will oversee exchanges” (to quote the Wall Street Journal). Note: this does not reflect subsidies.
  • $95 is the minimum annual 2014 tax that will be levied on people who do not purchase an Obamacare policy.

Any questions? …Oh, there are?  Cool.

  1. “That’s just the minimum!” Yes.  The rule of thumb is, $100 per year tax at $20K a year gross salary and it increases by $100 for every $10K of salary. Single people need to be making a lot of money – as in, six figures – before it becomes cheaper to pay for the insurance.
  2. “But there will be subsidies!”  Yup!  The numbers here assume a different average insurance premium (a higher one than the numbers in the WSJ), so they’re not really valid for comparison.  However: looking at Kaiser’s calculator it notes that anybody over the federal poverty level (about $11,490) is eligible for the subsidy.  A rather… paltry… subsidy.

Continue reading The Cold Equations of #Obamacare: $1,260 > $95.