When I got socked with a 25% increase in health insurance premiums last January, I’d assumed that that would be it for the year. In the past, like clockwork, there has been a staggering rate hike effective on New Year’s Day, but no more increases for the next twelve months. Not this year, apparently. On Friday, I received a notice of yet another 20% rate hike, and it left me wondering whether my premiums will have doubled by the time 2012 rolls around. Like all such health insurance notices since the passage of Obamacare, this one attributed the increase to new rules and to healthcare costs that continue to spin out-of-control: “Your new premium appears at the top of this letter and reflects a combination of recent changes required by Health Care Reform,” read the notice. Specifically, there were two reasons given for the increase: 1) the birthday of a policyholder; or, 2) an increase in claim levels by policyholders in my state, Colorado.
This the very same “reform” that the new Republican majority in Congress swore it would kill and which the Wall Street Journal labeled the “Worst Bill Ever”. No argument here. Unfortunately, for an execrable piece of legislation that a majority of voters despise, and upon whose egregious flaws Republicans trained their heavy artillery during last fall’s campaign, it is doing quite a bit of damage without having been even 20% implemented. It were as though the Fed had announced a trillion dollar stimulus package: the mere anticipation is all that’s needed to set off a defensive panic by all who are exposed to the dollar. In this case, the insurers will have exposure on the claims side that had previously been neutralized by their ability to peg rates to individual risk. No longer, though. One-size-fits-all policies will effectively require healthy policyholders subsidize the sick, women to subsidize men and young to subsidize old. If all of this was supposed to cause rates to level off and eventually to drop, scary letters like the one I just received from my carrier say the opposite is happening.
Media Lies
What amazes most is that the mainstream media would have us believe Obama remains a viable candidate for 2012. How could this possibly be so? The catastrophic threat posed by Obamacare alone caused voters to reject the Democrats en masse last November. Since then, tens of millions of healthcare policy holders are seeing their worst fears materialize in the form of huge rate increases. That should suffice to sink Obama in 2012, even if he were doing everything else right. Unfortunately, he is not. Far from it. The economy is slipping back into recession or worse, Afghanistan is looking increasingly like an unwinnable quagmire, and the president’s dangerously inept Middle East policy is about to embolden the jihadists into starting a war with Israel, if not with the entire world. Despite the backing of the New York Times and the usual bunch of other hard-left news outlets, we think Obama’s odds of getting reelected are very poor. Sarah Palin may be the only politician in the GOP field he could beat, but her candidacy, fortunately, seems unthinkable at the moment. Under the circumstances, we’ve decided to tune out the polls, with their rigged questions and surreal results, and pray that America survives Obama’s remaining 19 months in office.
(If you’d like to have Rick’s Picks commentary delivered free each day to your e-mail box, click here.)
Late coming to the table, but I have a question for you, Rick. What exactly does you getting a year older and an increase in claims by Colorado policyholders have to do with the Healthcare act of 2009, or for that matter any healthcare plan?
You actually hit on the reason for the mandatory participation into insurance. To spread the risk. Younger healthier people pay premiums now so that they can get lower costs down the road. You would not suppose that the increase was due to you using your coverage for your recent illness, do you? Welcome to the real world, this was going on long before Obama was elected. Only in your case, I doubt if the premiums were raised to, say, 60% of your income as what happened to many low income families.
I don’t know the solution (although I have my 2 cents worth), but I know that the model that was implemented after 1993 is not working for a large part of our population. My 2 cents worth is this. A single payor system that covers catastrophic costs. No one should have to face either going bankrupt or not having care solely due to the cost of an expensive procedure. A deductible of say $5ooo or $10000 per year would make it affordable for those employers who wish to provide coverage for their employees, and make coverage for the self-employed also affordable. This should also help eliminate the very real concern you have of some just flooding the doctor’s, etc. office as they would be responsible for that deductible.
But back to the increase in your premiums, it had less to do with the “Obamacare” and more to do with current insurance company practices. Those practices include taking the policy holders who cost more out of the main pool and putting them into a separate policy pools and then raising the heck out of those premiums. This serves two purposes: 1) allows lower premiums for the healthy, hopefully attracting more customers 2) raises the premiums on those the insurance companies would like to see go elsewhere for insurance.
I know because this has been happening to me over the past 5 years, long before Obama’s (or should I say Romney’s) plan was though out and passed.