State level hostility against the Obamacare costs residents plenty when it comes to rate increases.
Mad about recently announced rate increases to Obamacare? You should be, but blaming the Affordable Care Act itself would be wrong. The real problem is your state’s political leaders.
As the Los Angeles Times reports: “In all the knee-jerk hand-wringing over the announced rate increases for Affordable Care Act exchange insurance (sorry for the mixed metaphor, but it’s apt), one factor in the increases has been consistently overlooked. On average, states that have been hostile to Obamacare are facing the largest premium increases for 2017. Residents in states that have embraced the law will do much better.”
Charles Gaba, who the Los Angeles times calls “that indisputable tracker of ACA rate and policies” compared the weighted average premium increases for states that implemented Obamacare cooperatively versus the increases of states who have resisted the program.
Looking to Gaba’s findings, the Los Angeles Times observes that a couple of “caveats are in order.” For instance, “Figures for the resisting group may be skewed by Oklahoma, which will experience an off-the-chart premium increase of 76%, in part because it has only one insurance provider, Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The effect, however, is marginal, since Oklahoma has only about 164,000 enrollees in ACA plans. Gaba calculates that this would only skew the results 1.4 percent if Oklahoma was excluded from his calculations.
Similarly, Gaba’s findings for states that embraced the Affordable Care Act is “skewed by Minnesota where the weighted rate increase is more than 55%, in part because the state’s basic health plan appears to have siphoned off a large number of people who would otherwise be in the Obamacare pool, driving up costs for the latter.” In this instance, Gaba calculated removing Minnesota would lower the average increase by 2.8 percent.
As Gaba concludes in his report, published by ACA Signups – which tracks enrollments for the Affordable Care Act:
The states which are 100% on board with the ACA exchange provisions (running their own full state-based marketplace, expanding medicaid and sticking to the original cut-off date for “transitional” policies) average around 18%. If you remove Minnesota from the equation, it’s just 15.2%.
Those which implemented only one or two of the above provisions come in at around 26%. In a possibly coincidental quirk, all five of the “halfway” state exchange states (Hawaii, Oregon, Nevada, Kentucky and New Mexico) just happen to also fall into this category as well, which is completely appropriate.
Finally, states which are fighting the ACA kicking and screaming (no Medicaid expansion, no state exchange and allowing transitional plan extensions as long as possible) are averaging around 30%.
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