Blue Cross Asks for 60 Percent Rate Hike for Obamacare Plans

The failures of Obamacare are rising, and the worst is yet to come.

The largest health insurer in Texas wants to raise its rates on individual policies by an average of nearly 60 percent, a new sign that President Barack Obama’s overhaul hasn’t solved the problem of price spikes.

Texas isn’t alone. Citing financial losses under the health care law, many insurers around the country are requesting bigger premium increases for 2017. That’s to account for lower-than-hoped enrollment, sicker-than-expected customers and problems with the government’s financial backstop for insurance markets.

In a statement, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas said its request is based on strong financial principles, science and data. “It’s also important to understand the magnitude of the losses … experienced in the individual retail market over the past two years,” the statement said. The company says it lost $592 million last year and $416 million in 2014.

Millions of customers will be shielded from price hikes by government subsidies, which typically cover more than 70 percent of the premiums. People who don’t have access to a workplace plan can buy a policy directly through the health law’s marketplaces.

But many consumers aren’t eligible for the income-based subsidies and get no such protection. That demographic includes small business owners, self-employed people and early retirees. Under the law, most Americans are required to have health insurance or risk being fined.

“This is going to be a very big disrupter of the market,” said [Wichita Falls insurance broker Kelly] Fristoe. Some relatively healthy people “would probably be willing to roll the dice and take their chances” by dropping coverage, even if it means they might be fined.

The Obama administration said concerns about 2017 premiums are premature and overblown.

The program has been a fraud from start to finish. The unconstitutional requirement that everyone must buy the product or pay a large fine is a huge abuse and misinterpretation by the Supreme Court, and a product that you are forced to buy is by its very nature a bad product. It is also fraudulent to demand that people buy the product and then to rebate to selected individuals part or all of their premiums, thus allowing the government to perceptually decrease the actual price of the product.

Many experts believe that Obamacare is in a “death-spiral,” due to it’s unsustainable underpinnings. More than half the exchanges have disappeared, and eight out of the remaining eleven Obamacare insurance co-ops are likely to fail by year’s end. United Health Care, the nations largest health care insurance company, has indicated that they will be exiting most of the exchanges, and just last week said they would not participate in the California exchange, the largest in the nation.

Many other health insurance companies are getting out of the exchanges as well, citing massive financial losses and the problem of new enrollees being larger users of health care than expected, while younger potential enrollees are staying out and simply paying the fine. Obama and his toadies thought they pulled a fast one on the American people, and in many respects they did. They foisted much more expensive health insurance costs with huge deductibles onto people, and caused them to lose health insurance they already had. They also captured millions of young people in their web and caused them to pay a large fine or fee, with the total increasing substantially each year, with no product or service provided in return. And they lied to the American people about the whole scheme without anyone going to jail or even losing their job. That is astonishing, but par for the course with the Obama administration.

The Democrats have wanted to foist socialized medicine on the American people since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and made a strong effort under Bill Clinton’s administration, using Hillary as proxy to do the dirty deed. When information about the secret plans leaked out, the scheme was defeated, but in this case, blatant lying and deceit put Obamacare into place. Obama acts as if it is a key accomplishment of his administration, but as with so many of the things he boasts about, it is in fact an abject failure that is destined to come tumbling down soon after he departs from office.

Source: bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com