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ACA health insurance will cost the average person 75% more next year
- daft_pink 1y agoI’m a little bit confused with how it will cost the average person 75% more? Are the rates going up by the amount of the subsidy or are rates spiking significantly?
- bix6 1y agoMan I thought we were getting raked with our 8% increase. 75% is unbelievable.
- jasonthorsness 1y agoDoes “ACA health insurance” classification used here include everyone who buys insurance on their own who are not employed by a large-enough company or on Medicare/medicaid? The job-based insurance system in USA is so bogus.
- brandonb 1y agoYep -- ACA health insurance refers to the individual market.
- crowbahr 1y agoIt's kinda hard to tell in the article but it seems specifically to apply to subsidized ACA purchases. There are market rate purchases on the ACA site too - I don't expect those will go up. They're already ruinously expensive.
- lapcat 1y agoEvery plan is market rate. There is no distinction between subsidized plans and market rate plans. The individual subsidies simply reduce the cost of the marketplace plan for those who financially qualify for subsidies. Premiums for all plans have been going up basically every year, even for those who don't qualify for any subsidies.
- DennisP 1y agoSubsidies are going away but they're raising the unsubsidized rates because of that. This is the key paragraph: > If healthy people opt out, the insurance pool is left with those who cost insurance companies more — people who can't go without health insurance because of chronic conditions or expensive medications. "That's why insurance companies are going ahead and charging a higher premium, with the expectation that the market is going to get sicker next year
- jhfdbkofdchk 1y agoOnly the plans you buy through the state marketplaces.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoI've never dealt with it before personally, are there other places you can buy plans as an individual? How do the prices compare?
- ceejayoz 1y agohttps://www.healthcare.gov/ https://www.healthcare.gov/ Prices are rough these days, because Republicans later removed the individual mandate. The system was never gonna survive that; it changes the economics entirely.
- pitaj 1y agoYep the biggest problem with the ACA was that it doubled down on health insurance as a benefit of employment, when it should have taken steps to transition everyone off of employer provided plans.
- lalaland1125 1y agoIt would be a political disaster to transition people off their employer plans. The short term effect would be an increase in costs but no increase in pay for most people.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoWith a small tweak it would have the opposite effect. Just mandate that employers must add what they previously paid in health insurance to people's salary. So it would look like significant pay raises to a substantial portion of the populace. I bet that would be popular.
- pitaj 1y agoI don't know if you would even need to mandate it. Stop mandating it, and start taxing all benefits as income, and you remove the biggest incentive for employers for pay for them.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThat would suck for employees. They just effectively got an effective decrease in pay. A switch from employer-pay to government-pay should be a no-op for employees with employer health insurance. But in a naive scheme, it isn't. The burden for paying for health insurance moves from the employer to the employee (through increased taxes). The employer benefits because they stop paying for health insurance, the employee pays the costs. Voters, who are mostly employees, would hate it. OTOH, an on-paper pay raise for employees that doesn't cost the employer anything? That'll be much more politically palatable. "Both your taxes and your salary go up 10%" is a lot more palatable than "Your taxes go up 10%".
- skybrian 1y agoNo, not everyone. For example, you can buy health insurance from Kaiser either through the ACA marketplace or directly. But the ACA has tax credits that you wouldn’t get if buying directly.
- lenerdenator 1y agoAs with all things that are inhumane that the government is doing, the behavior will continue until a negative stimulus is introduced.
- butterlettuce 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Now that those subsidies are going away for next year, premiums are going to spike. For example, if someone paid $60 a month for their health insurance this year, they might be looking at $105 a month next year. I was on the exchanges, unsubsidized, until this year. Last year's premium went from $3,000/month to $3,600/month. I had to buckle and get on a company plan with less coverage this year. Meanwhile, every other piece of spare real estate in town is a new medical facility. Urgent cares, palatial orthopedic facilities… There's a crash coming.
- Forgeties79 1y ago> Meanwhile, every other piece of spare real estate in town is a new medical facility. Urgent cares, palatial orthopedic facilities… There's a crash coming. Consolidation of hospitals/medical facilities/practices and the rapid spread of PE firms is absolutely destroying our already cracking healthcare industry. A crash is definitely coming. And just like with the financial crisis, we’re going to be the ones footing the bill and/or just dying on hospital steps. Combined with so many doctors fleeing states with strict abortion/anti-LGBT laws, as well as the dismantling of programs encouraging doctors to work in under-served (often rural/low income/isolated) areas, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who’s going to be hit the hardest.
- DennisP 1y agoWe're likely to lose a lot of rural hospitals due to Medicaid cuts. We might need those new urban facilities, as those patients who do have insurance travel to the places still open.
- analog31 1y agoWhat I read is that the big beautiful bill includes subsidies to keep those hospitals open, just not for them to treat patients.
- giantg2 1y agoThe medicaid reimbursement rates are so low that hospitals have been closing anyways. This might speed it up, but the outcome was already in motion.
- whycome 1y agoYeah but if NPR is defunded then this isn’t a story. /s The article sometimes throws in the term Obamacare — is it still popularly called that? And do most Americans know it’s the same thing?
- billy99k 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoThis is, quite simply, a lie. https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2023-section-1-cost-of-health-insurance/#figure112 https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2023-section-1-cost-... Figure 1.12 shows average annual premiums from 1999 to 2023. The ACA was passed in the middle of that range. It's a sustained upwards march, before and after its passage. For all that cost - 2-3x as much as the other OECD nations spend, inclusive of taxes - we get shitty outcomes. https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2016/04/ftotHealthExp_pC_USD_long-768x871.png https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2016/04/ftotHealth...
- Covzire 1y agoPrior to ACA all my colleagues in my peer group had employer provided health insurance that cost us very little, and it paid for virtually all medical bills except prescriptions. A HDHP was an option, but it only saved maybe a hundred or two a month, if that. Today for most employees a HDHP is the ONLY option, and the cost is much higher than the old standard health plans were.
- ceejayoz 1y agoYour company is passing the ever-increasing costs (which, again, have been on a steady sloped increase both before and after the ACA, since the 1970s; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/health-expenditure-and-financing-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/health-expenditure-and-fi...) along to you, yes. This is a significant problem with our system; people think they get healthcare for $50/month, but it's really coming out of a reduced salary. You're getting fucked (as am I!), but the ACA isn't what's doing it.
- eddythompson80 1y ago> “Pretty much every insurance company is talking about the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA markets“ If I understand this correctly, enhanced premium tax credits were extended to 400% federal income poverty level during COVID. (e.g: federal income poverty line for a household of 1 is 15k), right?
- dgfitz 1y agoLooks like it https://www.medicaidplanningassistance.org/federal-poverty-guidelines/ https://www.medicaidplanningassistance.org/federal-poverty-g...
- jabjq 1y ago[flagged]
- chris_wot 1y agoYour taxes. That’s the reason for them.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWe have essentially two options: Help people get medical care, or help much sicker people get medical care on an emergency basis.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoThree. Although only Republicans are in favour of the final option.
- wat10000 1y agoDon't forget the third option: let people die from treatable conditions if they can't pay, which includes you if you ever end up unconscious without proof of insurance on you. Of course, this is so heinous that Ronald Reagan outlawed it and there's zero discussion of repealing that law. We've had universal health care in the US since 1986. All subsequent debate has merely been about how it should be done.
- alistairSH 1y agoNot sure if serious... taxes (which we're now lowering for the wealthy, so even fewer benefits can be provided to the not-wealthy).
- unethical_ban 1y agoI always downvote green accounts that troll. IMO participating on HN is a privilege earned through good faith discussion over time. If they want to make a point they can do it without being smart aleck and wasting peoples' time.
- chris_wot 1y agoI’ve never understood why America doesn’t have a decent health care system. And then America voted for Trump, and everyone appears shocked at what he has done… There is something very wrong with American attitudes.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoDepends where you look, but most of his voters don't know and/or don't care. I think the only thing he's done to rile them up so far this term is his recent comments on the Epstein case.
- RajT88 1y agoThe right wing media ecosystem they have created obscures the fact that Obamacare is the thing these people are using. Then, once it fails, they will just lie and again blame Democrats for it instead of circling back to their talking points about how they wanted to kill Obamacare. This is just some people. I have met a fair number of people who just think it is too bad, so sad if you are too poor or do not have a good enough job for good healthcare. I was visiting Canada once, and the folks at the company I was visiting recounted the last American who rolled through who espoused the "well, I guess they die" talking points - to their horror.
- DennisP 1y agoIf rates go way up next year, I don't see how they're going to convince people the Democrats are at fault.
- brandonb 1y agoThe ACA was originally designed as a "three-legged stool" of nondiscrimination (insurance companies can't charge higher rates to sick people), the individual mandate, and subsidies. If you remove one of legs of the stool, the market becomes unstable and you see price spirals like this. Jonathan Gruber (MIT econ professor, and one of the designers of the Affordable Care Act) gave a fairly detailed talk about how and why they designed the ACA the way they did, learning from a similar law in Massachusetts: https://youtu.be/2fTHqARiV_Q?si=SRC6Np-rjgUgAe4Z&t=679 https://youtu.be/2fTHqARiV_Q?si=SRC6Np-rjgUgAe4Z&t=679
- nothercastle 1y agoIn this case they removed 2. Subsidies and mandates
- mystraline 1y agoYep, the ACA was originally RomneyCare. Mitt Romney took the plan from the Heritage foundation (yes, the conservative neocon think tank). Hard low-controls capitalist plan. Heritage foundation made this plan after Hillary Clinton pushed universal healthcare in 1994, as first lady. Howls of 'death panels' were heard all over republican talking points and radio shows. (The 'death panels' aka rationing was seen as bad for government to do. However, we see a new type of rationing, based upon how much patients cost, and then denying care. That lead to the UHC execution, then approving more procedures, then getting sued by shareholders for that. Personally, government death panels are preferred to capitalist death panels.) Put simply: Obama passed republican legislation put forth by a republican governor and a republican thinktank, and was deemed a socialist. And now, the program is basically destroyed.
- loeg 1y ago(It's the OBBBA and knock-on effects.) The bill's Medicaid cuts will also impact the ACA market and health infrastructure broadly in the medium term.
- bilsbie 1y agoDoes anyone know if the medi share plans are any good?
- ceejayoz 1y agohttps://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-healthshare-healthcare-sharing-ministries-obamacare https://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-healthshare-healt... > For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences. Even the legit ones don't have to cover stuff; they aren't health insurance. Even if they do, many facilities and docs won't take it, because they aren't required to cover things and they don't want the fight.
- paxys 1y agoYou get what you vote for
- rsingel 1y agoIn the renewal quote we just got, our small company premiums went up 12 percent while employee contributions went up 43 percent. Don't know if that's just us or where the market is headed
- ThinkBeat 1y agoA bit of context from the article. The Biden administration started to heavily subsidized some health care plans with Covid as the backdrop, and now those temporary measures are ending. In so far as I have found and I might be wrong, congress never voted to fund and subsidize those medical plans indefinitely. Now health insurance companies are raising their rates on those specific plans since the government is no longer partially funding it, or perhaps not funding them as much. Then I am convinced the insurance companies raised their rates more then strictly required as they nearly always to to make even more money.
- KevinMS 1y ago> Now that those subsidies are going away for next year, premiums are going to spike. For example, if someone paid $60 a month for their health insurance this year, they might be looking at $105 a month next year. If you payed $60 a month you were mega subsidized. I'm at about $500 a month (50s, single, bronze). There's no way I'm suddenly going to be around $900. This is either clickbait or a NPR scare tactic.
- Y_Cumbinator 1y agoThe ACA Bronze Plan is like $850/m and has a $10k deductible, absolute madness
- deanmoriarty 1y agoFor someone like me who is considering quitting their job for an extended period of time, and whose financial situation will not qualify for any subsidy on the ACA, how much is the cost expected to increase? The article doesn't seem to say, since it talks about "average" (i.e. heavily subsidized I assume). Last estimates from a few weeks ago were ~$500/mo premiums for a bronze plan (+ deductible of course).
- cagey 1y agoFrom a more informative article[1] linked from TFA: "The expiration of the enhanced [premium] tax credits is expected to cause ACA enrollees’ out-of-pocket premium payments to increase by over 75% on average, with people in some states seeing their payments more than double on average." "The enhanced premium tax credits were originally passed by Congress in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and extended under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but they are set to expire at the end of 2025." [1] https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-will-the-2025-budget-reconciliation-affect-the-aca-medicaid-and-the-uninsured-rate/ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-will-the-2025-budget-re...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]