Media downplays impact
Average premiums for Obamacare plans will go up 25% in 2017 per Reuters (10/25/16). But the media insists it’s no big deal.
CNN claims that a year-over-year 25% premium increase is “predictable.” Considering that premiums have been rising by leaps and bounds for decades, perhaps it is predictable. But is it right? And wasn’t the ACA supposed to stop this? Hah!
What should have been predicted is that the ACA – with its reliance on the private health insurance industry – would NOT stop the skyrocketing cost of health care. According to Wendell Potter in a recent HEAL California article, “the country’s private health insurers have been doing a lousy job of controlling medical expenses for many years. It is the big failure of our multi-payer system that insurance company executives hope we will never catch on to.”
Fact: Subsidies are false savings
Meanwhile, the corporate media snow job continues. Salon suggests that premium subsidies will “soften the blow.” Here again, no one wants to admit that the emperor has no clothes! Subsidies do NOT reduce premiums. They only spread the pain around. Subsidy-eligible households pay a lesser share of their premiums, but subsidizing ever-rising premiums takes an ever-rising share of our taxes. Bottom line, high premiums drag down our national economy, draining both household and government budgets unnecessarily.
In fact, in 2015, American taxpayers paid $28 billion to the private health insurance industry to subsidize the insurance of 8 million people. This is hardly loose change. And as premiums go up, so do the subsidies.
Fact: The victims are not to blame
And finally, according to Vox, premiums are increasing because the people who signed up for coverage “were sicker than the insurance companies expected.” Please. Talk about “blame the victims.” The insurance companies have been raking in the bucks for decades by insuring the cream of the crop (those of us healthy enough to hold down a job that provides benefits). Now we ask them to insure everybody else and they start squealing like the pigs they are.
In conclusion, according to the mainstream media, high premium increases were predictable, they won’t cost us that much more money, and it’s all the fault of the sick people anyway.
What a relief! But not so fast. Let’s take a closer look at who is affected.
Fact: 7% is 22 million Americans
According to HealthInsurance.org, only 7% of Americans are impacted by these premium increases (because the subsidized people getting hit with higher premiums on the exchanges don’t count and the increases don’t apply to people with employer-provided benefits).
Oh. Only 7%, that’s not so bad. That’s only more than 22 million people – the populations of New York State, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine put together.
You know, people like me. Yes, in 2017, my husband and I face a 36% percent increase – over $400 a month – in our health insurance premiums.
Why is this? We don’t get health insurance from work. We make a little too much to qualify for subsidies. And my husband’s doctor isn’t in one of Covered California’s ultra-narrow provider networks. So we have to buy our insurance off the exchange, or face a disruptive change of medical provider.
Hit with high premiums?
In case you, like us, are one of the “insignificant” 22 million people getting slapped with sky-high increases, HealthInsurance.org has some suggestions for you. Hopefully they apply to your situation, because they didn’t apply to ours.
If you’ve had it with the health insurance companies, and believe health care should be about people, not profits, join HEAL California! If you want to learn more about Improved Expanded Medicare for All, sign up for our newsletter, join us on Facebook and Twitter. Better healthcare is within reach, but we have to come together and fight for it.