New Executive Order Helps In Fight Against Obamacare
Since the Affordable Care Act took full effect in 2014, premiums in the individual market have more than doubled. The average cumulative increase is 105 percent, equivalent to average annual increases of 19 percent. Family premiums have increased 140 percent. In Alabama, Alaska, and Oklahoma, premiums have more than tripled. Analysts predict an average increase of 18 percent for 2018; premium increases will average 24 percent in Washington State and 45 percent in Florida. Maryland Insurance Commissioner Al Redmer predicts that if these trends persist, the Exchanges “will implode.”
ObamaCare’s skyrocketing premiums are not due to rising health care prices. They are due to the hidden taxes ObamaCare imposes. The law’s community-rating price controls increase premiums for the healthy in order to reduce premiums for the sick. The law also requires individuals and small employers to purchase a government-defined set of “essential health benefits,” including coverage (e.g., maternity care) that many consumers do not want.
When healthy consumers flee the Exchanges, premiums could rise even faster than they already are, and the Exchanges could indeed collapse as Maryland’s insurance commissioner predicts. If so, we must understand that as a manifestation of Obamacare’s unpopularity. If community rating and other provisions of the law were as popular as Obamacare supporters claim, consumers would be lining up to pay the resulting hidden taxes. But they won’t–and even Democrats know it.
So when Democrats object to reforms that would let consumers avoid Obamacare’s hidden taxes, they are actually implicitly conceding that even the Obamacare provisions that they claim are popular are actually unpopular. What Democrats appear to mean when they complain this executive order “undermines the law” is that it could undermine their illusions about Obamacare’s popularity and sustainability.
