Covered California trying to hide 100% increase in premiums

[Warlord]

Obamacare rate hikes 100% for Covered California:

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As the L.A. Times noted last week, “The average premium for individual plans sold through EHealthInsurance in California last year was $177 a month. Covered California said the average premium for the three lowest Silver plans statewide was $321 a month, albeit for more comprehensive benefits.” That's a pretty big hike.

Over at Forbes, Avik Roy offers a more thorough comparison of current eHealthInsurance.com rates in California to next year’s exchange premiums in the state.

If you’re a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month. (That’s the median monthly premium across California’s 19 insurance rating regions.)

The next cheapest plan, the “bronze” comprehensive plan, costs $205 a month. But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH), the average cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92. In other words, for the average 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.

Under Obamacare, only people under the age of 30 can participate in the slightly cheaper catastrophic plan. So if you’re 40, your cheapest option is the bronze plan. In California, the median price of a bronze plan for a 40-year-old male non-smoker will be $261. But on eHealthInsurance, the average cost of the five cheapest plans was $121. That is, Obamacare will increase individual-market premiums by an average of 116 percent.

Individual market rates doubling in the space of a year year? That sounds an awful lot like rate shock to me.

More:
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/30/california-regulators-hide-obamacare-rat

[Anti Federalist]

LOL - I saw Krugman just yesterday saying the opposite

[Warlord]

LOL - I saw Krugman just yesterday saying the opposite

See article.

Up is down in the empire of lies.

[Anti Federalist]

Obamacare: Krugman’s California Dreamin’

http://blog.heritage.org/2013/05/30/obamacare-krugmans-california-dreamin/

Since California released its health care exchange premium rates late last week, liberals such as Paul Krugman have argued that Obamacare’s predicted “rate shock” will fail to materialize next year. At least three reasons explain why liberals’ argument falls short:

1. Dubious Assumptions About Exchange Enrollment

Some independent observers questioned whether the insurance companies in California’s exchange made favorable—and dubious—assumptions about the people who would buy insurance on the exchange next year. The Washington Post noted that “if sick people sign up en masse next year…that could dramatically increase costs for insurers, who would then have to recoup the money by increasing premiums.” One vice president at Avalere Health, a consulting firm, told the Post that a delayed premium spike could happen:


[The projected premium rates] are low enough that you have to think, are there going to be health plans in this market that are underwater…. It’s so hard to predict because you don’t know who’s going to show up on the market.

2. A Pre-Existing Preview

While no one knows who will sign up for exchange coverage next year, an Obamacare program already up and running—one established for individuals with pre-existing conditions—has attracted far sicker enrollees than first anticipated. As The New York Times reported last week:


The administration had predicted that up to 400,000 people would enroll in the program, created by the 2010 health care law. In fact, about 135,000 have enrolled, but the cost of their claims has far exceeded White House estimates, exhausting most of the $5 billion provided by Congress….

When the federal program for people with pre-existing conditions ends on Jan. 1, 2014, many of them are expected to go into private health plans offered through new insurance markets being established in every state. Federal and state officials worry that an influx of people with serious illnesses could destabilize these markets, leading to higher premiums for other subscribers.

People in the pre-existing condition program have been much sicker than actuaries predicted at the time the law passed. If that phenomenon repeats itself in the exchanges—either because only sick individuals enroll, or because employers struggling with high health costs dump their workers into the exchanges—premiums will rise significantly in future years.

3. Bait and Switch

As a column in Bloomberg notes, for all the press around California’s supposedly low exchange premiums, officials generated such spin only by comparing apples to oranges:


Covered California, the state-run health insurance exchange, yesterday heralded a conclusion that individual health insurance premiums in 2014 may be less than they are today. Covered California predicted that rates for individuals in 2014 will range from 2 percent above to 29 percent below average small employer premiums this year.

Does anything about that sound strange to you? It should. The only way Covered California’s experts arrive at their conclusion is to compare apples to oranges—that is, comparing next year’s individual premiums to this year’s small employer premiums. (Emphasis added.)

Therein lies one of Obamacare’s many flaws. Liberals now argue that while some may pay more for coverage, they will get “better” benefits in return. However, when campaigning in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama didn’t say he would raise premiums; he said he would give Americans better coverage: He promised repeatedly that he would cut premiums by an average of $2,500 per family. That gap between Obamacare’s rhetoric and its reality makes arguments such as Krugman’s seem fanciful by comparison.

[jkr]

but if ANYTHING happens to me they will take care of ME...AND IT WILL BE "FREE"!!!

ARE PEOPLE THAT GULLIBLE?