More Obummercare Success Stories
The hits keep on happening.
Insurers helped cheerlead the creation of Obamacare, with plenty of encouragement – and pressure – from Democrats and the Obama administration. As long as the Affordable Care Act included an individual mandate that forced Americans to buy its product, insurers offered political cover for the government takeover of the individual-plan marketplaces. With the prospect of tens of millions of new customers forced into the market for comprehensive health-insurance plans, whether they needed that coverage or not, underwriters saw potential for a massive windfall of profits.
Unlike Canklescare, the insurers were on board this time. That’s why we didn’t see any of those Harry and Louise ads like we did during Canklescare. So, how did that work out for the insurance companies this time?
Six years later, those dreams have failed to materialize. Now some insurers want taxpayers to provide them the profits to which they feel entitled – not through superior products and services, but through lawsuits.
The insurance companies didn’t realize that when you lay down with dogs, you get fleas and when you deal with Dimocrats, you get screwed.
Earlier this month, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina joined a growing list of insurers suing the Department of Health and Human Services for more subsidies from the risk-corridor program. Congress set up the program to indemnify insurers who took losses in the first three years of Obamacare with funds generated from taxes on “excess profits” from some insurers. The point of the program was to allow insurers to use the first few years to grasp the utilization cycle and to scale premiums accordingly.
As with most of the ACA’s plans, this soon went awry. Utilization rates went off the charts, in large part because younger and healthier consumers balked at buying comprehensive coverage with deductibles so high as to guarantee that they would see no benefit from them. The predicted large windfall from “excess profit” taxes never materialized, but the losses requiring indemnification went far beyond expectations.
Anyone with a functioning brain knew this would happen. Republicans said this would happen. But Dimocrats, high on unicorn farts, just knew that Obummercare would be a raging success. As with so many Dimocrat programs, it has turned out to be a massive failure.
In response, HHS started shifting funds appropriated by Congress to the risk-corridor program, which would have resulted in an almost-unlimited bailout of the insurers. Senator Marco Rubio led a fight in Congress to bar use of any appropriated funds for risk-corridor subsidies, which the White House was forced to accept as part of a budget deal. As a result, HHS can only divvy up the revenues from taxes received through the ACA, and that leaves insurers holding the bag.
You shoulda known better but greed is a powerful emotion.
They now are suing HHS to recoup the promised subsidies, but HHS has its hands tied, and courts are highly unlikely to have authority to force Congress to appropriate more funds. In fact, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services formally responded by telling insurers that they have no requirement to offer payment until the fall of 2017, at the end of the risk-corridor program.
You trust Dimocrats, you get screwed. Ask Republicans about all the promised spending cuts they got when they raised taxes over the years.
That response highlights the existential issue for both insurers and Obamacare. The volatility and risk was supposed to have receded by now. After three full years of utilization and risk-pool management, ACA advocates insisted that the markets would stabilize, and premiums would come under control. Instead, premiums look set for another round of big hikes for the fourth year of the program.
Consumers seeking to comply with the individual mandate will see premiums increase on some plans from large insurers by as much as 30 percent in Oregon, 32 percent in New Mexico, 38 percent in Pennsylvania, and 65 percent in Georgia.
But I thought the premiums were supposed to drop by $2500 per family. That’s what Obigmouth told us. You mean he lied?
Thus far, insurers still claim to have confidence in the ACA model – at least, those who have not pulled out of their markets altogether. However, massive annual premium increases four years into the program demonstrate the instability and unpredictability of the Obamacare model, and a new study from Mercatus explains why.
The claims costs for qualified health plans (QHPs) within the Obamacare markets far outstripped those from non-QHP individual plan customers grandfathered on their existing plans – by 93 percent. They also outstripped costs in group QHP plans by 24 percent. In order to break even without reinsurance subsidies (separate from the risk-corridor indemnification funds), premiums would need to have been 31 percent higher on average for individual QHPs.
The main problem was that younger and healthier people opted out of the markets, skewing the risk pools toward consumers with much higher utilization rates – as Obamacare opponents predicted all along. With another round of sky-high premium increases coming, that problem will only get worse, the study predicts.
In other words, the Affordable Care Act has succeeded in making health insurance more expensive. It has also cut down on choices as insurance companies are leaving markets where they can’t make money. The Dimocrats and Obungler, tried to fix a non-existent problem and made things worse. It should have been declared unconstitutional, but the Dimocrats obviously had sumpin’ on Chief Justice John Roberts and he refused to rule correctly on this piece of garbage. The American people, who were overwhelmingly against Obummercare voted to keep it in effect by reelecting Obongo. It boggles the mind.
Don’t put it past the gummint to bail out the insurance companies if Crooked Cankles wins the election. Obummercare is doomed to failure unless the gummint comes to its rescue and props it up. That will happen if Thunder Rodent Thighs wins the election.
