Another Study Confirms Obamacare as the Unaffordable Care Act
Despite the high level of partisanship in the United States, both sides can agree on something even as controversial as health care: Both Democrats and Republicans believe Obamacare has failed to deliver.
Based on their last primary debate, Democrats running for the 2020 presidential nomination can’t give away more health care subsidies fast enough. Some of them want to abolish Obamacare outright. But all of them agree the law has not lived up to Barack Obama’s claims during the 2008 campaign, when he repeatedly promised that hisplan would reduce premiums by $2,500 for the average family.
Shrinking Without Subsidies
The CMS analysis of risk adjustment data submitted by insurers focuses on the unsubsidized marketplace. These individuals, who make more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($103,000 for a family of four in 2019), do not receive any subsidies from the federal government to offset their premiums.
The analysis concludes that, while the subsidized marketplace has remained steady for the past several years, the number of unsubsidized people purchasing insurance has steadily shrunk as premiums continue to decline. In 2018, even as average monthly subsidized enrollment increased by a modest 4 percent, average monthly unsubsidized enrollment plummeted by 24 percent.
From 2016 through 2018, the unsubsidized market shrank by an even larger amount. Successive price increases — an average 21 percent premium rise in 2017, followed by another 26 percent jump in 2018 — priced many people out of the market.
During those two years, the average monthly enrollment by unsubsidized people fell by 40 percent, from 6.3 million to 3.8 million. Six states saw their unsubsidized enrollment drop by more than 70 percent, with Iowa’s unsubsidized enrollment shrinking by a whopping 91 percent.
The large percentages of unsubsidized people dropping coverage in many states — in most cases, because they could not afford their rapidly escalating premiums — show the unstable nature of the Obamacare “marketplaces.” With only people who qualify for subsidies able to afford their premiums, most states’ insurance markets have become dependent on the morphine drip of subsidies from Washington.
‘Popular’ Preexisting Conditions?
Why have premiums skyrocketed so that only people receiving federal subsidies can afford to pay their insurance rates? A Heritage Foundation analysis from last year provides a clear answer:
A cluster of [Obamacare] insurance-access requirements — specifically the guaranteed-issue requirement and the prohibitions on medical underwriting and applying coverage exclusions for pre-existing medical conditions — accounts for the largest share of premium increases.
In other words, the preexisting condition provisions have proven the largest factor in pricing literally millions of people out of their health insurance coverage. This means, ironically enough, such people now have no coverage should they develop any such condition.
The left does not want to talk about these people. While the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation will survey Americans about the supposed popularity of the preexisting condition provisions, the organization refuses to survey Americans about the cost of these regulations — for instance, whether people think those “protections” are worth spending an extra several thousand dollars a year in higher insurance premiums. As the old legal saying goes, “Don’t ask a question to which you don’t want to know the answer.”
But the American people need to know the answers and need to understand the effects of Obamacare. Liberals wouldn’t have you know it, but families care more about the affordability of health coverage than about losing their coverage due to a preexisting condition. Reforms codified by the Trump administration will help provide portable and more affordable coverage to many Americans and represent one of several better solutions to tackle the preexisting condition problem.
The left’s “solutions” to Obamacare’s skyrocketing premiums represent more of the same — more taxes, more spending, and more subsidies to make coverage “affordable” for a select few. But sooner or later, the left will eventually run out of other people’s money. The Unaffordable Care Act’s failure to deliver demonstrates that the American people need and deserve a better approach than the left can devise.
This post was originally published at The Federalist.