Plan B Forum

Health Reform: ObamaCare rates will skyrocket next year, according to its former chief. Enrollment is tumbling this year. And a big insurer is quitting most exchanges. That’s what we learned in just the past few days.

Marilyn Tavenner, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, revealed that she expects ObamaCare premium hikes “to be higher than we saw previous years,” including last year, which saw double-digit rate increases across the country.

Tavenner, for those who don’t know, was head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services until early 2015, which means she helped bring ObamaCare to life. In November 2014, she was boasting how “the Affordable Care Act is working to improve competition and choice among marketplace plans.”

Now that she’s jumped to the other side of the fence, she’s discovered the dark side of the health reform monster she helped unleash.

Why will 2017 rates spike even higher? In addition to the cost of complying with ObamaCare’s insurance regulations and mandates, there’s the fact that the ObamaCare exchanges have failed to attract enough young and healthy people needed to keep premiums down. Plus, two industry bailout programs expire this year, Tavenner notes.

Oh, and she admits that people are gaming ObamaCare just like critics said they would: buying coverage after they get sick — since insurance companies can no longer turn them down or charge them more — then dropping it when they’re done with treatments. “That churn increases premiums. So you have to kind of price over that.”

The timing of these coming rate shocks couldn’t be worse for ObamaCare supporters, since insurers will start announcing premium increases just as the presidential election heats up. Insurers have already requested 18% rate increases in Virginia.

Meanwhile, IBD’s Jed Graham reported on Friday that ObamaCare enrollment has already dropped an average of more than 14% in five states since February — a faster rate of decline than last year — as people get kicked off for not paying premiums.

Finally, we learned on Tuesday that UnitedHealth Group (UNH) is planning to drop out of almost every ObamaCare market it currently serves after losing $1 billion on those policies.

The result will be less competition in those states. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that “more than one in four counties where UnitedHealth participates nationally would see a drop from two insurers to one if the company exits and isn’t replaced by a new entrant.”

Skyrocketing premiums, fewer choices in the marketplace, and people fleeing ObamaCare in droves after signing up. This isn’t exactly what Obama promised when he signed ObamaCare into law.

Democrats running for re-election this year might want to think twice about wrapping their arms around this terminally ill law. And Republicans should be busy crafting a replacement.

...and there was no response to any of the critical points, as expected.

Just days after House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) went on Meet the Press to fearmonger about Obamacare, yet another study came along to sock it to his desperate Obamacare claims. An independent health policy research program study released Wednesday showed all of his predictions about Obamacare were wrong. Way wrong. Wrong on every single fearmongering prediction and claim they made.

Under Obamacare, nearly 17 million have gotten insurance coverage since the fall of 2013. Seventeen MILLION.

The Rand analysis of their study revealed the facts:

Insurance coverage has increased across all types of insurance since the major provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, with a total of 16.9 million people becoming newly enrolled through February 2015, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Researchers estimate that from September 2013 to February 2015, 22.8 million Americans became newly insured and 5.9 million lost coverage, for a net of 16.9 million newly insured Americans.

Republicans are running on taking that insurance away?

Republicans like to claim that it’s all Medicaid expansion. Survey says, wrong again.

Among those newly gaining coverage, 9.6 million people enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans, followed by Medicaid (6.5 million), the individual marketplaces (4.1 million), nonmarketplace individual plans (1.2 million) and other insurance sources (1.5 million).

And remember how Republicans sounded the hysteria alarms that Obama was ruining their insurance and nobody would get to keep their insurance?

The study also estimates that 125.2 million Americans — about 80 percent of the nonelderly population that had insurance in September 2013 — experienced no change in the source of insurance during the period, according to findings published online by the journal Health Affairs.

Republicans said Obamacare would cause private employers to stop offering insurance. Survey says, wrong again:

RAND researchers say the findings that the biggest gain in coverage was from employer-sponsored insurance runs counter to predictions that many employers may quit offering insurance in response to the Affordable Care Act and suggests that regardless of whether that occurs, employer-sponsored coverage will remain the nation’s major source of health insurance coverage.

Republicans say do not deserve to live healthy lives or indeed to live at all

Long Run wrote:These 17 million people presumably were there when the R's used the unpopularity of the ACA to take over Congress in 2010 and keep it ever since.

Most of the new insureds are part of the Medicaid expansion

Among those newly gaining coverage, 9.6 million people enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans, followed by Medicaid (6.5 million), the individual marketplaces (4.1 million), nonmarketplace individual plans (1.2 million) and other insurance sources (1.5 million).

The RAND study estimates 11.2 million Americans are insured through new state and federal marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act, including 4.1 million who are newly covered and 7.1 million people who transitioned to marketplace plans from another source of coverage.

In addition, among the 12.6 million Americans newly enrolled in Medicaid, 6.5 million were previously uninsured and 6.1 million were previously insured.

Long Run wrote:When I take the numbers and put them in a meat grinder and stir up what come out, I can pretend they mean what I want them to

Scooter wrote:

Long Run wrote:When I take the numbers and put them in a meat grinder and stir up what come out, I can pretend they mean what I want them to

FTFY