As reported by The Associated Press, tens of millions of Americans face a new round of double-digit health insurance premium increases in 2018.
Scores of American neither qualify for Obamacare exchange subsidies nor do their small employers provide coverage, so they must bear the full costs. Many are already paying hundreds per month in premiums and for insurance that comes with thousands in deductibles.
As noted by the AP:
Millions of people who buy individual health insurance policies and get no financial help from the Affordable Care Act are bracing for another year of double-digit premium increases, and their frustration is boiling over.
Some are expecting premiums for 2018 to rival a mortgage payment.
Worse, not only are costs going up but choices of health insurance providers are going down.
Those most at risk include middle-class Americans working for small firms; retirees; skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen; musicians; business owners.
“We’re caught in the middle-class loophole of no help,” Sharon Thornton, a hairdresser from Delaware, told the AP. She noted that currently, she’s paying around $740 per month in premiums, but she’s anticipating a 35-percent increase next year, which will bring it to $1,000 or more.
“It’s like buying two new iPads a month and throwing them in the trash,” she said, adding that the plan she has bought comes with a $6,000 deductible — so it’s like not having any coverage at all, except for those rare times when she might get hit by a truck.
“To me, $1,000 a month is my beach house that I wanted to have,” Thornton said.
When told that she could get taxpayer-provided subsidies if only she’d just earn less, that made her even angrier. “My whole beef is that the government is telling me, ‘If you work less, we’ll give you more.’”
The AP noted further:
If people such as Thornton drop out, they not only gamble with their own health. Their departure also means the group left behind gets costlier to cover as healthier customers bail out. That's counter to the whole idea of insurance, which involves pooling risk.
Some of Obamacare’s provisions are popular, such as the prohibition against insurance companies banning coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. But what the president and the Democrats who passed Obamacare left out when they lied repeatedly to get their law passed is that it’s more expensive for insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. That’s why insurance companies would charge those customers more back before Obamacare was the law of the land; it wasn’t greed, it was a necessity. Sicker people cost more to cover. (Related: Thanks, Democrats: Get ready for another year of double-digit insurance premium increases.)
Speaking of Democrats, the AP tried to lay blame for Obamacare’s failure to accomplish practically anything it was supposed to accomplish — cheaper monthly premiums, lower out-of-pocket costs, more choice, etc — on Republicans:
…[A]n influx of sicker-than-expected customers drove up costs for insurers, while many younger, healthier people stayed on the sidelines. Political opposition from Republicans complicated matters by gumming up the law's internal financial stabilizers for insurers.
This is a blatant lie, as not a single Republican voted for Obamacare. In fact, if anyone is guilty of gerrymandering with the law, it’s Obama, who unconstitutionally changed it repeatedly.
In any event, the GOP did fail to repeal and replace the law earlier this year after promising repeatedly for seven years that Republicans would do so if they have got a congressional majority and one of their own in the White House.
There is a bipartisan effort afoot now to make dramatic changes to the law in the Senate. But until lawmakers act, Americans will continue to get butchered economically by healthcare “reform” that only exacerbated the worst parts of the U.S. system as it existed before the Affordable Care Act was passed.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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