...on Thursday, the Ohio Department of Insurance announced that, based on the rates submitted by insurers to date, the average individual-market health insurance premium in 2014 will come in around $420, “representing an increase of 88 percent” relative to 2013...
...It’s called “rate shock,” but it’s not shocking to people who understand the economics of health insurance. In August 2011, Milliman, one of the nation’s leading actuarial firms, predicted that Obamacare would increase individual-market premiums in Ohio by 55 to 85 percent. This past March, the Society of Actuaries projected that the law would increase premiums in that market by 81 percent...
...What are the drivers of the increase? According to Milliman, the two biggest drivers are (1) risk pool composition changes, such as forcing the young to subsidize the old, and the healthy to subsidize the sick; and (2) Obamacare’s required expansion of insurance benefits, particularly its mandated reductions in deductibles and co-pays...
Stephen Green notes that insurers no longer have control of the products they are allowed to offer:
The so-called “bronze” plan — the very minimum you’ll be allowed/mandated to buy — contains more benefits than many of the “Cadillac” plans Obama sneered at from 2008-2010. And if you and your family don’t need all those benefits? Well, too bad. Because Big Government couldn’t get Big Insurance on board with the new big, bold scheme without promising to shovel much more of your money at it... So that’s precisely what they’re doing.
Please review the above chart. I included it for a specific reason. Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law in 1965. These systems were single-payer and, as such, enforced anti-free market price controls.
The results of these interventions have been stunning. And, with the advent of Obamacare's price controls, we have only just begun to see the market distortions that will result in untold misery for Americans.
Chart: Sam Baker, University of South Carolina.
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