Tag Archives: Obamacare

News

Connecticut approves health insurance hikes caused by Obamacare

Leave a comment

From the Hartford Courant. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut requested a wide range of premium increases, which will take effect Oct. 1, to cover the costs of new benefits required by federal health reform. Higher prices mostly affect new members shopping for a health plan on the individual market rather than people who have group plans through an employer or some other organization.

The Connecticut Department of Insurance approved Anthem’s request without changes, including a boost of as much as 22.9 percent just to comply with one provision: eliminating annual spending limits per customer. But it’s unclear how much more customers will pay because of the variety of plans and the complexity of other factors, such as a person’s age.

New provisions mandated by federal law to start Thursday include allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plan until they turn 26, eliminating annual and lifetime limits on the amount of money an insurer spends per customer and mandating that insurers cover the full cost of preventive services, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

The looming question is how much those new mandated benefits, along with rising medical costs, will raise prices for health insurance next year. Insurers will submit a new batch of rate requests in October and November to take effect in 2011.

Hans Bader reminds us of what else has happened:

Employers like AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Verizon have already reported major cost increases due to the new health care law.

As noted earlier, the health care law raises taxes on the middle-class and investors in future years. Obamacare will cause many harms, such as reducing life-saving medical innovation and increasing state budget deficits. It is based on accounting gimmicks that will increase the federal deficit, as even some Obama supporters have admitted — like David Brooks, who in a moment of candor called arguments for the bill ““unbelievable” and “insane.””

This is what talking about “hope” and “change” amounted to.

News

If insurance companies complain about Obamacare, they get sanctioned

1 Comment

Want to know how the Obammunists are responding to businesses who complain about having to raise helath care premiums on their employees (or drop coverage completely)?

From Yahoo News. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama’s top health official on Thursday warned the insurance industry that the administration won’t tolerate blaming premium hikes on the new health overhaul law.

“There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a letter to the insurance lobby.

“Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections,” Sebelius said. She warned that bad actors may be excluded from new health insurance markets that will open in 2014 under the law. They’d lose out on a big pool of customers, as many as 30 million people nationwide.

This sort of shows the level of economic ignorance present in the current White House. They require more things to be covered, like pre-existing conditions and covering children until they are 26, and then they expect that there will be no “unjustified rate increases” in the cost of health care plans. Huh? You might as well put a bunch of zombies in charge of the country. Who doesn’t understand that if insurance companies have to cover more claims, then the cost of premiums will increase? It makes no sense that premiums would stay the same – the money has to come from somewhere!

Ed Morrisey writes:

Rarely have we heard a Cabinet official tell Americans to stay out of political debates at the risk of losing their businesses.  It points out the danger in having government run industries and holding a position where politicians can actually destroy a business out of spite.  It also demonstrates the thin skin of our current administration, where Hope and Change means keeping your mouth shut and pretending that everyone is happy while businesses slowly circle the drain.

This administration is the most anti-business administration in history. We’re losing jobs and wealth at a precipitous rate. They don’t know what they are doing, and their threats only scare businesses even more. It’s government by ignorant bullies.

News

Health care premiums will increase due to Obamacare

1 Comment

Story in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming weeks, complicating Democrats’ efforts to trumpet their signature achievement before the midterm elections.

Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators.

These and other insurers say Congress’s landmark refashioning of U.S. health coverage, which passed in March after a brutal fight, is causing them to pass on more costs to consumers than Democrats predicted.

The rate increases largely apply to policies for individuals and small businesses and don’t include people covered by a big employer or Medicare.

[…]Many carriers also are seeking additional rate increases that they say they need to cover rising medical costs. As a result, some consumers could face total premium increases of more than 20%.

[…]In addition to pledging that the law would restrain increases in Americans’ insurance premiums, Democrats front-loaded the legislation with early provisions they hoped would boost public support. Those include letting children stay on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26, eliminating co-payments for preventive care and barring insurers from denying policies to children with pre-existing conditions, plus the elimination of the coverage caps.

Weeks before the election, insurance companies began telling state regulators it is those very provisions that are forcing them to increase their rates.

Aetna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, said the extra benefits forced it to seek rate increases for new individual plans of 5.4% to 7.4% in California and 5.5% to 6.8% in Nevada after Sept. 23. Similar steps are planned across the country, according to Aetna.

Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon said the cost of providing additional benefits under the health law will account on average for 3.4 percentage points of a 17.1% premium rise for a small-employer health plan. It asked regulators last month to approve the increase.

In Wisconsin and North Carolina, Celtic Insurance Co. says half of the 18% increase it is seeking comes from complying with health-law mandates.

When you require insurance companies to force all of their customers to pay for new mandatory coverages and you remove limits on payouts, it makes the premiums go up! Obviously – somebody has to pay for the happy-talk eventually.