[spring_chicken]

Originally Posted by valuemkt

My wife works in this area and told me some facts about ACA

1. Because you are buying a fully insured individual policy, the ACA requires every person to be covered for the 13 essential health categories they designated under ACA. This includes maternity. So even if you're past child bearing, you're paying for this coverage. There are other coverages you may not want but I'll forego the boring details. Elimination of ACA means you can go back to policies where you didn't purchase coverages you didn't need.

2. ACA provides subsidies for lower income individuals so some pre-65 retirees may be able to get a government subsidy and pay less than the full price. As the prices rise, the government is increasing subsidies. For those folks, they think Obamacare is great because they now have affordable health care. For people who don't get subsidies, the prices have been going up significantly and they get to pay the huge increases.

3. On top of all this, the government requires insurance companies to underwrite people who enroll in the public exchanges (the sickest) and in the individual market as a single risk pool. The government initially agreed to reimburse insurance companies for their losses for taking on the sicker people. The feds have only been paying carriers for about 14 - 16% of their losses and so the carriers are losing their shirts - that's why they are exiting.

4. Health care never really gets cheaper unless you buy less coverages or have higher deductibles and then use less care because you are healthy. That's because the higher the deductible, the lower the premium.

ACA required you to buy more coverages than you may need and then they failed to reimburse insurance companies for millions in losses, so everyone suffered.

On the whole, ACA swizzled monies to different places and didn't improve the overall quality of care. And reductions in Medicare reimbursements to doctors and hospitals only end up having them charge more to the non-Medicare people. Have you ever seen a doctor or hospital take a pay-cut?

Good analysis.