Great article; the first paragraph says it all.
Imagine an industry in which the competing firms have spent several years dramatically raising prices while simultaneously reducing the availability of services in markets nationwide, leaving customers with fewer options and higher costs. You might expect progressive leftists to be among the first to demand congressional hearings on this anti-competitive disaster for consumers. But in the any-tool-in-the-shed scramble to maintain Washington’s control over health care, the left is now celebrating this outcome as a welcome sign that insurance markets may be stabilizing.
The Beltway crowd has been gleefully sharing the results of a recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which states:
So Kaiser claims that the insurance industry has managed, despite all the burdens and distortions of ObamaCare, to push the heavy new costs on to customers and taxpayers while reducing service offerings. Is this the “better deal” Democrats have been promising? The party’s elected officials have used reports like Kaiser’s to argue that Republican claims of an ObamaCare “death spiral” are overstated.
Such is the absurd devotion to maintaining the ObamaCare status quo that we now have the spectacle of progressive heroine Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) taking to Twitter to defend the insurance industry against the potential predations of Republican reformers. Yesterday the Bay State’s favorite radical leftist warned that a proposed Republican plan to end the law’s mandates “guts the marketplace &ndas h; premiums will skyrocket. Insurers will quit.” The good news is that Sen. Warren has finally found a marketplace that she doesn’t want to gut—at least while she’s helping to mount the goal-line stand against any GOP reform.
It’s true that if lawmakers keep all of ObamaCare’s costly regulations in place but no longer force people to buy expensive products they don’t want, it will increase the already substantial pressure Washington has applied to insurers. That’s one reason Republicans hope to give states flexibility to allow less expensive insurance plans that consumers do want to buy—which Sen. Warren and her colleagues also oppose.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/say-anything-1501183931?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb
Imagine an industry in which the competing firms have spent several years dramatically raising prices while simultaneously reducing the availability of services in markets nationwide, leaving customers with fewer options and higher costs. You might expect progressive leftists to be among the first to demand congressional hearings on this anti-competitive disaster for consumers. But in the any-tool-in-the-shed scramble to maintain Washington’s control over health care, the left is now celebrating this outcome as a welcome sign that insurance markets may be stabilizing.
The Beltway crowd has been gleefully sharing the results of a recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which states:
Concerns about the stability of the individual insurance market under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been raised in the past year following exits of several insurers from the exchange markets, and again with renewed intensity in recent months as debate over repeal of the hea lth law has picked up. Our earlier analysis of premium and claims data from 2011 – 2016 found that insurer financial performance indeed worsened in 2014 and 2015 with the opening of the exchange markets, but showed signs of improving in 2016. A similar analysis by S&P looking at a subset of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans found a comparable pattern.
In this brief, we look at recently-released first quarter financial data from 2017 to examine whether recent premium increases were sufficient to bring insurer performance back to pre-ACA levels. These new data offer more evidence that the individual market has been stabilizing and insurers are regaining profitability.
In this brief, we look at recently-released first quarter financial data from 2017 to examine whether recent premium increases were sufficient to bring insurer performance back to pre-ACA levels. These new data offer more evidence that the individual market has been stabilizing and insurers are regaining profitability.
So Kaiser claims that the insurance industry has managed, despite all the burdens and distortions of ObamaCare, to push the heavy new costs on to customers and taxpayers while reducing service offerings. Is this the “better deal” Democrats have been promising? The party’s elected officials have used reports like Kaiser’s to argue that Republican claims of an ObamaCare “death spiral” are overstated.
Such is the absurd devotion to maintaining the ObamaCare status quo that we now have the spectacle of progressive heroine Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) taking to Twitter to defend the insurance industry against the potential predations of Republican reformers. Yesterday the Bay State’s favorite radical leftist warned that a proposed Republican plan to end the law’s mandates “guts the marketplace &ndas h; premiums will skyrocket. Insurers will quit.” The good news is that Sen. Warren has finally found a marketplace that she doesn’t want to gut—at least while she’s helping to mount the goal-line stand against any GOP reform.
It’s true that if lawmakers keep all of ObamaCare’s costly regulations in place but no longer force people to buy expensive products they don’t want, it will increase the already substantial pressure Washington has applied to insurers. That’s one reason Republicans hope to give states flexibility to allow less expensive insurance plans that consumers do want to buy—which Sen. Warren and her colleagues also oppose.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/say-anything-1501183931?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb
