The White House announced Monday that several health insurance companies are seeking double-digit rate hikes next year to offset the costs of the influx of new, and likely unhealthy, customers signed up through Obamacare and the continuing surge in prescription drug prices.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield is asking for a 26 percent premium increase for customers in North Carolina and at least 30 percent increases for plans in Maryland, New Mexico and Tennessee. Highmark Health Insurance Co. in Pennsylvania is also asking for a 30 percent increase. Rate changes for states with their own exchanges are unknown at this time and it is believed that not all states will see rate increases.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration and others are quickly trying to temper reactions from those crying "see, I told you so" as they see the scenario they warned would happen if the Affordable Care Act passed. But one developer of the Obamacare exchanges said "it is way too early" to predict what the trends will be in 2016. “We’re really victims of our own transparency here," Joel Ario of Manatt Health Solutions told Politico. "It used to be that nobody found out about these things until they were final.” And Caroline Pearson of Avalere Health assured, "These are not warning signs of a catastrophe."
But as the Politico report points out, "The Obama administration doesn't have much power to hold down rates."
A Fox News report:
Regulators in many states have the power to reject price increases, and many who don't are expected to at least pressure insurers to soften their plans. Health insurance price hikes have been the subject of growing scrutiny for years.
Health insurance experts say it's tough to draw broad conclusions about prices from the requests released Monday. The health care law only requires insurers to report proposed hikes of 10 percent or more. That's only a partial picture of the market that tilts toward a worst-case scenario.
"It's hard to generalize, but that said, I think all signs are pointing to bigger premium increases than in 2015," Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation told the Associated Press.
Another factor that will affect premiums is the lawsuit (King v. Burwell) currently before the Supreme Court in deciding the legality of the Obamacare subsidies many low-income customers qualified for to help pay for their plans. If the ruling, expected near the end of June, proves to invalidate the tax credits, millions of customers will be faced with a full-price bill, thus making this situation exponentially worse.
