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Showing Original Post only (View all)The Latest (Fraudulent) Attack On Obamacare Conveniently Ignores The Law’s Cost-Cutting Provisions [View all]
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/27/1779961/dishonest-attack-obamacare/On Tuesday, the Associated Press (AP) published an article recounting a Society of Actuaries (SOA) study that finds health insurance premiums will jump an average 32 percent for Americans individual policies under President Obamas overhaul. That titillating claim formed the basis of multiple news agencies headlines Wednesday morning, including NBC News, Fox News, and U.S. News and World. But as several other analyses show and the reports own authors admit these assertions are based on an extremely narrow interpretation of the health care law that assumes rising costs in perpetuity while ignoring its very real cost-cutting measures.
In essence, SOA argues that Obamacare provisions extending health coverage to all Americans regardless of their pre-existing medical conditions will dramatically raise costs in the individual insurance market especially since sicker, older Americans will have guaranteed access to insurance and cannot be charged more than three times the premiums of younger people. The Societys projections are quite dramatic, finding that premium rate increases by 2017 would be 62 percent for California, about 80 percent for Ohio, more than 20 percent for Florida and 67 percent for Maryland.
Corporate insurance giants have used many of these same arguments to dishonestly justify double-digit rate hikes on their customers, despite soaring profits. But these claims are founded on a baseline that assumes current health care cost trends to be set in stone, and ignore even by the SOAs own admission almost all of Obamacares most important consumer protections and market regulations aimed at lowering overall costs. Rick Foster, a retired Medicare actuary, admitted that, although the studys projections are consistent with certain health care trends, they dont necessarily reflect the bigger picture:
Having said that, Foster added, actuaries tend to be financially conservative, so the various assumptions might be more inclined to consider what might go wrong than to anticipate that everything will work beautifully. Actuaries use statistics and economic theory to make long-range cost projections for insurance and pension programs sponsored by businesses and government. [...]
Kristi Bohn, an actuary who worked on the study, acknowledged it did not attempt to estimate the effect of subsidies, insurer competition and other factors that could mitigate cost increases. She said the goal was to look at the underlying cost of medical care.
In fact, more comprehensive studies of the health reform law that incorporate all of its provisions rather than just the potentially negative ones have found that [m]ost young adults and families will be largely shielded from the full effects of the narrower age rating bands thanks to the ACAs increased eligibility for Medicaid and tax credits offered through state health insurance exchanges or through access to employer-sponsored insurance, and that Americans between the ages of 21 and 27 purchasing insurance through the individual market will be protected by Medicaid/CHIP or exchange-based subsidies under reform.
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of course, what the Republican degenerates are leaving out is that the people now insured won't be going to Hospital Emergency rooms for health care. the cost to hospitals of uncompensated care is just passed on to the insurance companies (and the local, state and federal government) and the insured pay higher premiums as a result. With more people insured they will be going to docgtors for health care instead of hospital emergency rooms - the most expensive place to get health care. Uncompensate care adds about $1,000 to the average persons insurance premiums. http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq
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