[quote=“JoeFriday, post:124, topic:31”]
As the younger and healthier irresponsibly drop coverage, it means the hospitals will return to the pre-ACA practice of cost-shifting uncompensated care to overpricing care to those with coverage, spiraling healthcare costs upwards once again, as an additional 13 million have no coverage.[/quote]
Young healthy people don’t have lots of expenses, so I doubt they will have a big impact on the whole pricing system. The rest still have insurance via the ACA. Even if it does somehow play out the way you describe, cost shifting at the provider level is another way to transfer costs from people who can’t pay to people who can (that’s good, right?). Also, in your example, the group market bears its share of the costs instead of just the individual market, so it’s a much smaller price impact overall and hence more sustainable.
Millions of seriously ill or chronically ill Americans will no longer be able to afford coverage, frequently resulting in their deaths.
Why? They just have to quit their job so they can subsidized policies. Here was an example of a gainfully employed contractor who had to either get divorced or slash her full time job to be able to afford health insurance. Of course at $2100/month for two people, it’s still not particularly “affordable”, they just look poor enough that someone else like you or me are paying for them via our taxes.
I don’t know why you can say all the biggest insurers are bad examples. They are most of the market.
Aetna, United, Anthem and others made political moves, and intentionally lost money, while crying poor-mouth. It’s well documented that they low-balled their premiums and then all in one fell swoop brought them up to where they should have been all along, smack in the middle of the election campaign, portraying a false impression of large premium hikes due to the ACA.
They were pressured by the Obama administration to offer low premiums initially to sell the country on the law in exchange for various taxpayer bailouts later (many of which were later canceled). Then as those bailouts and desired merger approvals didn’t materialize, they had to raise prices to reflect their actual costs. The last of the risk corridor payments ran out in 2016, so this year was the first year we got to see the true cost of Obamacare’s impact on the individual market and they’re pretty ugly.
They also pulled out of markets, once again claiming they were losing money, but Centene, Medica, and Oscar proved the lie as they swooped in to the areas that had been intentionally abandoned and they are profitable.
Centene and Medica are running bottom tier Medicaid-style plans (their core business is Medicaid), and yes, they are profitable since at the bottom of the income scale, everyone is spending the taxpayer’s money. Since it’s “free”, there’s no adverse selection. That business model doesn’t work if people have to actually pay with their own money, though.
You’re wrong about Oscar. Unlike the other two, Oscar offered a traditional decent insurance network, and, like all the others trying to provide traditional insurance benefits to the ACA market, they are losing tons of money and just slashed their networks last year trying to contain losses:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-28/losses-mount-for-obamacare-startup-oscar-as-law-s-repeal-looms
Healthcare costs are rising at a third the rate annually than they were prior to the ACA, and the previous rising national healthcare cost curve has been bent downward.
You should check with Kaiser or the ACA info sites to inform yourself.
One can torture the stats to say anything you want. What’s clear to me is that my ACA premiums are going up a lot, and that’s true across nearly all the country every year, and that’s what matters to my wallet. Whatever cost savings might be going on, they’re not showing up for ACA customers.