From the
January 5, 2013 New York Times:
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
Did I miss something? Or wasn't the whole point of Obamacare to make health insurance available and affordable? I heard a reporter on NPR this morning start the same discussion with "In spite of." No, I don't think so, unless you the reporter would also say, "In spite of the approach of summer, temperatures are rising."
Unless the strategy is to move us towards a single payer system. For that to occur, private insurance must continue to escalate its pricing.
ReplyDeleteLook at it this way. If Anthem Blue Cross is only raising rates by 26% instead of the 39% back in 2010 then that is a 13% cut.
ReplyDeleteThat is how the fever swamp does math.