- Premiums for people who get health insurance through a large group (including companies with more than 50 people) would be unchanged, or maybe a little lower, under the Senate bill. People in this category account for 70% of the nonelderly population CBO looked at.
- Premiums for people who get insurance through a small group would also be largely unchanged. But a small percentage of people who get insurance through a small group would be eligible for insurance subsidies, and those people would see their rates fall by about 10%.
- Premiums for people who buy health insurance on the individual market would go up by 10% or more. But the majority of people in this category would be eligible for subsidies, and those people would wind up paying nearly 60% less, on average, under the Senate bill, because of the effect of the subsidies.
Health insurance premiums will likely mirror what’s happened in Massachusetts since enacting mandated health insurance:
- Massachusetts has the most expensive family health insurance in the country
- Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s largest health plan with 2.5 million members, predicted that its average premium rates will rise 10 to 11 percent.
There are no plans in the Senate bill to control mandated insurance premiums we all may have to purchase from legal monopolies. These monopolies are not required to offer “affordable” plans. Massachusetts is just now beginning to experiment with new ways to pay doctors almost 3 years after mandating insurance. It will take at least 5 years for these new methods of payments to prove themselves. Let’s say the feds try to do the same thing and follow the same timeline. Eight years later, we’ll have preliminary evidence that new methods of paying doctors may be more cost-effective, around the same time the average premium costs a mandated $28,500 per year per family.
I hate to be so negative. But the top down approach is too little and too late. Healthcare has been heading this way for the past 20 years and the industry and do-nothing past presidents enabled this financial meltdown to happen.
And a growing consensus of high profile health policy experts agree.