Obamacare’s history of rate shock
2017 isn’t the first year to see Obamacare rate hikes. The most profound hikes took place in 2014, Obamacare’s first year, when the health law’s thicket of insurance regulations drove up the cost of coverage by an average of 49%. Premiums for Obamacare “silver” plans went up by 7 and 11% in 2015 and 2016, according to McKinsey & Co. Add onto that the reported 22% increase in 2017, and you have a cumulative increase of 116%: more than double the pre-Obamacare rate.
As a result of these high premiums, far fewer people are enrolling in Obamacare’s exchanges than the government predicted in 2010 when the law was passed. Back then, the Congressional Budget Office predicted 21 million Americans would be enrolled in ACA exchange plans by 2016. Instead, it was 12 million.
Excuse #1: Few Americans are affected by Obamacare’s premium hikes
The Obama administration is trying to claim that Obamacare’s premium hikes aren’t that big a deal, because few people have enrolled in Obamacare exchange-based plans. “This is only for people who are buying their health [coverage] on the exchanges. It’s around 3 percent of the country,” argued former Obama official Austan Goolsbee on The Kelly File. But Austan and others have it economically backwards.
There are three categories of people affected by Obamacare’s exchange premium hikes. The first are people enrolled in exchange-based coverage: the 3 percent. The second are people who are enrolled in off-exchange individual market coverage: another 2.5 percent. The third are the thirty million people who remain uninsured because they can’t afford Obamacare-based premiums: another 10 percent.
