The next open enrollment period for health insurance under Obamacare opens this Saturday, November 15, and shoppers will be largely greeted by good news—lower premiums. Yes, once again a Republican myth about Obamacare—premiums will skyrocket!!!—is busted. Kaiser Family Foundation has expanded its premium review for 2015 to include
48 urban areas, and has found an average 0.2 percent decrease in benchmark silver plans. Those are the plans sold on every exchange that set the benchmark for subsidy levels granted to shoppers. Vox's Ezra Klein has the
details.
Keep in mind that the 0.2 percent drop is the average across all the measured cities. There are places where prices are skyrocketing (like Anchorage, AK, where they're rising by 28 percent; or Minneapolis, MN, where they're rising by 18 percent) and places where prices are plummeting (in Jackson, MS, prices are falling by 24 percent; and in Denver, CO, they're falling by 15.6 percent). […]
Obamacare's benchmark silver plans are its most important. The silver plans—which cover 70 percent of expected health-care costs—are the most popular plans in the law, and the benchmark silver plan is what the law's subsidies are tied to.
But there are other plans in the law, too. The bronze plans are, for many, Obamacare's cheapest option: they only cover 60 percent of expected health costs, so premiums are lower. But Kaiser's analysis found that premiums for bronze plans will, on average, rise by 2.3 percent.
There's one thing this analysis points out yet again—people with existing Obamacare policies shouldn't just auto-enroll back into the same plan. First, they might very well be able to find a comparable plan at a lower price, and second, their subsidy level could very well be changing, since it's based on the lowest-priced silver plan available on their exchange. If those plans have cheaper premiums this year, subsidy amounts could be lowering for everyone. The only way to determine that for the consumer is to shop again and see what's available, and what their subsidy will be.
There's another thing this analysis points out: Obamacare is working the way it was intended and is creating competition in the marketplaces, bringing in new insurers and—on average—lowering premiums. But it's also doing something else, and that's holding down the increase in healthcare costs overall. What that means in the big picture, as Ezra points out, is that Obamacare cost the government $104 billion less than the Congressional Budget Office initially predicted for 2014. That's how much less the government is paying out in subsidies than CBO thought it would. And if Kaiser's projections hold, the CBO is going to have to revise down costs again for 2015. (With the caveat that the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't destroy the subsidy structure sometime next year.)
So, seven million newly insured (not counting all those added to Medicaid, and the young people newly covered by their parents' plans) in plans that will remain affordable, and it's all costing the government less than predicted and the rise in healthcare costs is being slowed down dramatically. Of course Republicans want to repeal all that!