ACA Premiums to Surge Next Year, Early Requests Show

The first glimpse of what health-insurance companies plan to charge for Obamacare plans next year suggests there’s no relief ahead for consumers saddled with high premiums.

Several insurers in Maryland and Virginia are seeking double-digit percentage increases in monthly costs for individual medical plans in 2019. The largest increases are being sought by CareFirst, which wants to nearly double the amount it charges on average for one coverage option in Maryland, and raise the cost of another in Virginia by 64 percent.

Virginia and Maryland are the first states where 2019 rate requests have been made public. Increases are anticipated across the U.S. as insurers continue to grapple with the aftermath of last year’s battle to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

Many health plans have stopped selling health coverage through the exchanges created four years ago under Obamacare. The Republican-led attempt to overturn the health law last year caused premiums to surge, as insurers expected that undoing the law’s requirement that all Americans have health insurance would leave them with a smaller and sicker pool of clients.

The repeal effort ultimately failed, but the Trump administration overturned the penalty for going without insurance, and opened the door for insurers to sell cheaper, skimpier plans.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-07/obamacare-premiums-to-surge-next-year-early-rate-requests-show

This is.... not great for the health of the program or the system at large.

Trump couldn't repeal it, but he ****ing broke it.

I'll never understand why people hate the notion that people out of work (or even people who are working that don't get the option of healthcare) get the option of some basic health coverage that doesn't break the bank even further.

Additionally, with all the waste and broken stuff in this country, I find it hypocritical that so many "god-fearing Christians" seem to go after healthcare like it's the devil, instead of accepting the very christ-like notion that it's OK to help your fellow man out. There are plenty of legitimate battles to fight out there, healthcare, as far as government waste goes, is probably 101 on a list of 100 things to target.

Hell, divert 5% of what was going to go to the military and tax corporations 1% more. Boom, done.

Apparently they broke the ACA by no longer forcing poor people to pay for coverage they could not afford to use, so this seems like an extremely odd reaction.

Don't be silly. People want to do away with the ACA because it's not working. In many parts of the country, rising premiums were a problem well before Trump laid a hand on it.

Maybe if there was a public option, the markets wouldn't have reacted the way they did. Too bad the ACA's version of a "public option" was a disaster and sent many non-profits out of business by having them flooded with medical bills they couldn't afford.

And military spending is largely discretionary. It changes all the time, just like healthcare but in very different ways. You can't just take away a percentage and reliably use it for healthcare.

For one person my current cost would be $750 min. without subsidy.

its almost not worth even having insurance

Obama as well, but he slowed down the speed at which premiums were rising. Trump sped them up.

Incoming how ACA had nothing to do with Obama and is all Republicans fault.

ACA has everything to do with Obama and the democrats who passed it, but if you are going to claim that Trump and the Republicans who meddled with it in blatent attempts to make it fail has nothing to do with surging prices then your credibility will be pretty low in my view.

I have never had to pay for health insurance because my state passed a Medicaid expansion. Conservative states continuously refused to pass Medicaid expansions. Is it President Obama's fault that he left it up to red states to cover their citizens in a fair way and they passed the burden on to the poor?

The entire health insurance industry is basically insolvent without the individual mandate. Expect rates to go up and insurers to go out of business every year until we end up with single payer out of necessity. It will be painful getting there, but we are on our way.

Preach! I'm personally dealing with the decision making right now here in Indiana. The argument republicans are making is that the ACA doesn't work, and what they leave out is that it's not working because they chose to make it not work.

You are the one who argued that they broke the ACA by no longer forcing poor people to pay for coverage they could not afford to use. I am just commenting on the incongruity of your rhetoric.

They broke the insurance industry, really. Now there is no reason for a healthy person to have insurance if their employer doesn't pay for it. Insurance companies have to cover pre-existing conditions. Rates will go up, more people will drop coverage, rates will go up again, even more people will drop until there are no insurance companies left.

This is what has just killed me about the entire healthcare debate from the beginning. There has been a segment that has continuously saying how ideas won't/aren't working, but when they're invited to offer solutions or ways to make it work their only answer is to scrap the whole thing. That makes it pretty clear that they don't want it to work at all to begin with. Whatever, lesson learned. Next time we have sixty votes we go universal coverage or bust.

So poor people? If your grand idea for propping up a failing industry is to squeeze poor people harder, your plan sucks and your worldview is warped.

Poor people get huge discounts on insurance through the Obamacare exchanges. If my employer were not offering health insurance, I would not pay for it at this point, and I can afford it. There is just no reason to be covered when I can get insurance after I'm already sick.

Likely untrue unless you are a giant doof. It is pretty hard to get health insurance on the way to the hospital. The preexisting condition change isn't designed to retroactively cover the cost of accidents and short term illness, which is the bulk of claims for everyone outside of the old.

Even if it was true however, you have a decent job, so it isn't a concern. Only folks without decent jobs have to worry about being so myopic as to think this is a smart way to do business. You are still attempting to prop up a failing industry on the back of the poor.

My current ACA plan:

Employer doesn't have to offer insurance due to size.

$89.99 per month.

$500 deductible per person.

20% co-insurance until out of pocket maximum of $6750 reached, then 100% coverage.

Wonderful plan! I wish I could keep it forever. Thank you, Obama!

Part of the way Obama did this was by delaying important parts of the ACA, one of them an excise tax that is supposed to make the ACA deficit neutral. The tax was supposed to go in last year, but it was incredibly unpopular and would've probably left less people with coverage and rising premiums, so it was delayed two years. Trump is either going to delay it again or kill it, which means we will have to worry about how the ACA is going to affect spending (or at least pretend to, since no one actually cares about spending).

A month or for the whole year?

I can all but guarantee that's for a month unless it only covers tylenol and bandages. My employer plan costs 1000 a month (half paid by me, half paid by the company).

I suppose it depends on the age of the person and the type of plan. Some people have high dedutible, catastrophic coverages, or did in the past.

lol

since when does "christian" mean "christ-like"?

oh wait.

Reminds me of: The economy is recovering -> everything will be more expensive. Which is happening in Europe.

But this sounds way more serious.

BTW 4 days ago a confused man stabbed three people to near-death in my country. The prime minister did the calculations and concluded that dismantling the social care system was still worth it. Everyone patted him on the back. Good job pm. We live in a better world now. /s

Its $750 a month!

age might affect the price I dont know but its a lot.

$750 per month is a typical premium for typical insurance coverage. It's amazing to me that 40% of Americans don't see a problem with that.

I think most get it via employer and dont even pay attention to it.

I know I never have. yeah, money comes out of my check to pay for it but I no longer recall how much and its been decades the last time I looked

so yeah it was a shock for me to see what my pre-retirement cost might look like.

The part that gets me is this part:

If I have income of $12,000 year or less I get zero subsidey which means I pay the full $750 a month.

If however, I make MORE than $12,000 a year but less than I think $37,000 my cost is around $0-$135 a month

So I HAVE to make at least $12,000. Capital gains does count as income, but my plan was to slowly dwindle down my investments until I got to SS. so now I estimate I have to work around $6,000 a year to quality (the rest would come from dividends and captail gains)

@tryit: Yeah, if we had universal healthcare, I think I could retire somewhere around 50-55. Without it, I'm working until I'm old enough to draw social security, so likely 70 or so.

https://spectator.org/uncle-sams-deadly-cancer-screening-advice/

Here are some of the good medical care as a result of Obamacare.

ACA is a GOP wet dream

requiring people to buy health insurance from private companies?

come on, you know they love that

Trump said he'd have more people covered and it would cost everyone a lot less.

How's that working out?

I was reading an article a while back, and I can't find it now, that basically argues that the entire purpose of modern conservatism is to fight against any and all change in the status quo and, if possible, roll back recent change as much as possible. It doesn't matter that the ACA was built on a Republican idea, it's Republican strategy to fight it at all costs. in fact, the article was basically chronicling a shift in conservatism, beginning with Reagan, that saw the party shift away from Burkean conservatism that attempted to moderate change and make it work and towards a form of conservatism that opposes change at all costs espoused by William F. Buckley. Mitt Romney would probably be considered in the former camp, meaning his raison d'être is out of vogue with modern Republicans. It's basically what I said before about people complaining about the ACA not working, but when asked to make it work their only response is to scrap it. "Hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing." Republican strategy in a nutshell.