My new premium for 2016 is up 40%. It was up 25% last year. Awesome.
Well, rates were skyrocketing before the ACA as well, that’s the entire reason why the ACA exists - if it isn’t helping, it probably is not much worse than it would have been anyway!
Actually… nevermind.
@cosmicfish I can only speak for my own rates. I have been self employed for over 25 years and have been paying for my own health insurance that entire time. I just looked at old tax returns. I was paying $4600 in 1999. I was paying $6600 in 2009. The minimum I could pay now with a much higher deductible is $13,100/year. I am certain that rates would not be up this much without ACA.
@Parent1337, what kind of coverage were you getting pre-ACA? That I have had the same employer since 2006 and we were already essentially ACA-compliant from 2006. My rates were going up at double-digit rates each year I was with the company.
Simply put, the full range of treatments out there are extremely expensive, and our system of private insurance and private doctors and private hospitals and private attorneys means that there is a heck of a lot of profit being pulled out above and beyond the actual costs. And that has nothing to do with the ACA.
My policy is the same pre and post ACA, They have allowed me to keep it. The biggest hit to premiums is the elimination of existing conditions. That group should pay more. A lot more. That’s how insurance works. Higher risk=higher cost. However, ACA forbids charging more for pre-exisiting conditions. Thus, the high cost is spread across all policies(that started Jan 1, 2014). There’s also the added cost on one’s tax bill, but that’s another topic…
The plans under the ACA are also age-rated. Older people pay more.
Preexisting conditions didn’t just pay more, they were often uninsurable.
My non-profit health insurance purchased through my state’s exchange is going belly up. We will have to change before the end of the year and of course all the other options are more expensive. Thinking of switching to Kaiser. I will miss my doc, someone I’ve been with for years, but it looks like I can no longer afford him…
Maybe you should shop around. You may find comparable coverage at a better rate. Easy to do, you can go to whatever exchange your state uses.
Yes, we plan to shop around. The one great thing with our state’s exchange is it employs lots of brokers who, free of charge, will go through all the different plans. Signing up for the insurance was quick and easy in my state. It’s too bad the company we chose is going under.
For quick shopping and changing variables and seeing immediately how things change I really like using the healthsherpa dotcom website. $1091 per month does seem like a lot for these high deductible policies (but cover everything you don’t need but don’t cover eye exams)
I commend you for zeroing right in on the issue, @Parent1337. It’s exactly correct that your insurance premiums have gone way up because now your insurer has to offer the same policy to sick people, whereas before, they could opt to sell it only to healthy people. And of course healthy people are much cheaper to insure than sick people.
It’s a matter of political debate whether sick people should pay more because they cost more and people who cost more should be charged more, or everyone of the same age should pay the same because people who have the bad luck to be sick shouldn’t therefore be doubly injured by being socked with big medical bills as well. And this is not a debate we can have on CC. It’s just a simple political disagreement. I think people should all pay the same, you think healthy people are entitled to cheap insurance.
I am grateful that excluding those with pre-existing conditions is no longer allowed. If it were, neither of my kids would have insurance…at all.
If we didnt have employer sponsered health that came about and the laws that forbid people to have private insurance this would have never happened. So those who became sick were forced out and you pay for them one way or another. Hospitals cant refuse treatment at the er. If you think aca has saved money our govt just spent biilions on electronic health records and billions more on ICD10. Compliance is expensive and it does not provide healthcare. And by the way for those who think that those who have preexisting conditions should pay five to ten times the rate of those who have been lucky enough not to have a sick family member need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask what if it was your kid who would die without that medical insurance.
Whether that premium is high or not may depend on whether it is a family plan. And remember that before the ACA, if you or someone on your plan became seriously ill, they could dump you with no recourse and no chance of purchasing another plan. So what you had before was sort of insurance… as long as you didn’t REALLY need it.
Seems the actuaries calculate these cost factors in medical coverage just as they do with auto insurance.
Most of our healthcare costs arent even the cost of providing healthcare but regulatory cost. Ever notice how many people today work in doctor’s offices? It used to be just the doctor. To see a doctor you just wrote a check and everyone could pay. Then we went to HMO’s and employer sponsered insurance and thats when medical care’s cost spiraled out of control. AMA has just increased the cost more by adding more bureaucracy to the system. How much time do nurses spend in hospitals proving care versus entering data into the computer? Most of their time is doing the later. It used to work well in this country and people could afford major medical until we got insurance companies involved in providing all care and employers being the gatekeepers to health insurance.
It is a whole different thread to discuss, but certainly huge advances in medical technology and drugs have been cost drivers as well. Back when you wrote a check, there was no MRI machine, and premie babies just mostly died. And there was no genetic testing of your tumor to determine which drugs would be most effective.
And certainly there is a discussion to be had around pricing of those devices and drugs as well – but it makes me a bit ill to discuss patent law protections that drug companies use to extend and extend and extend their high priced models.
I don’t dispute that the complexity of billing and the abundance of different insurance plans also add to costs. But some of the documentation complaints you have are also related to liability protection for physicians and hospitals. So we could discuss tort reform as well…
But I’d really rather not.
I’m just saying… there was never a time in America’s modern medical history when “everyone could pay” to see a doctor. Let alone hospital stays and whatnot.
No really, there wasn’t. I promise. I’ve seen many medical bills from the first half of the 20th century and who paid them (hint: it wasn’t the people… they couldn’t afford them. It was the state.)