Thank you, President Obama. Your arrogant, uninformed and, now we know from MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, deceitful effort to push the U.S. health care system closer to your preferred single-payer model has more than doubled my wife’s health insurance premiums.
My wife has a Texas-based individual policy. The premiums for this past year, while not cheap, didn’t seem unreasonable. We were generally very happy with her coverage. But that policy ends Dec. 31, and she must enroll in an Obamacare-qualified plan.
Our insurance agent, having done several comparisons, suggested that most of her clients with policies from that insurer would likely be best off remaining with that company. But, she warned, most would be paying more.
She wasn’t kidding!
So my wife went on the insurer’s website to see what was available among the policies that Obama and the Democrats require her to have if we want to avoid Obama’s IRS imposing a penalty on us.
If she chooses a similar plan with the same $2,500 deductible, her premiums will more than double.
Alternatively, she can switch to a $5,000 deductible—twice her current deductible—for about $25 more a month. But that’s only if her doctor will accept that coverage. He accepts patients from that insurer, but insurers in many cases insurers have moved to “narrow networks”—i.e., a much more limited group of in-network doctors and hospitals—in order to keep the premiums from rising even higher.
This exercise provides one of the best indicators of what Obamacare is doing to premiums, because we are working with the same person and insurer and similar coverage to what she had. The only difference is Obamacare’s requirements.
It was completely predictable. In fact, health actuary Mark Litow and I predicted it in the Wall Street Journal last year. But now it’s hitting the pocketbook.
Obama and the Democrats paid a political price in the 2010 elections and again this November for their efforts to create a government-run health care system. But I suspect they haven’t finished paying yet.
As premiums rise, the Affordable Care Act will likely be as big an issue in 2016 as it was this year. As the voters, and maybe even the media, demand to know when the “affordable” part begins.