Did insurance premiums really increase because of Obamacare? I am continuing to write my essay on Universal healthcare, showing both the pros and cons, but I haven't been able to find any evidence Obamacare actually increased premiums, all I can find are conservative media outlets saying so. Trump often claimed Obamacare caused insurance prices to rise, and even some to lose their insurance, but I'm have trouble finding any evidence of that. Does anyone know anymore about this, or have any links to credible sites showing evidence of it?
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Yes, dramatically so, my premiums doubled for my family within a couple of years. Turns out that giving a predatory industry a captive audience doesn't make prices go down.
This is what I thought, but I'm having trouble locating any studies or facts that back up this claim.
Just compare historical premium averages over time.
I know people who were kicked off their insurance or were forced to pay for stuff they didn’t need (like childcare when their kids were grown) but that is anecdotal
Don't forget the people who ditched their plans all together because they could never reach their deductibles let alone get enough money out of the insurance company to make the premiums worth it. I've seen deductibles as high as $5000 for singles and $10000 for families. Why pay the premiums when you're not getting any benefits from the plan?
For when you get some horrific injury and don't have a spare $300,000 laying around to cover the surgery and hospital stay.
They should allow catastrophic health insurance for that and appropriately price the risk instead of expecting people to pay the price of a comprehensive plan but only receive the benefits of a catastrophic plan. The current system just allows higher risk people to rip off their neighbors.
Exactly.
Catastrophic plans are the only sane insurance. Insurance for everything defeats the point of insurance, has caused insane rates and been used to massively inflate the cost of medical care. It just becomes a middle man that you have to work through to get medical coverage, which lets the medical industry charge even more instead of actually having to compete.
It causes insurance to be practically required, even if not legally mandated. All part of the plan.
You can sorta get that with an HSA linked plan
There has been a continual decrease in benefits while the cost goes up since Obamacare. Whether you can blame that all or not on Obamacare, it did not achieve its ostensible populist goals. Yeah you pay for stuff you don't need, because actually trying to get them to pay for anything you do need is like pulling teeth.
One of the things Obama care caused was by causing hospitals to form monopolies and duopolies. Due to some changes in the way insurance interacts with those medical entities, it very strongly promoted that they unify or go out of business as it practically mandated exclusivity deals. This reduction in competition greatly exacerbated issues around Healthcare costs as they drastically raised prises. Sadly this is only 1 facet of many of the plagues of issues Obama care unleashed upon us.
Notably, this happened in Michigan to such a degree that nearly their entire healthcare system is functionally useless. Instances for example of major surgeons having pilot's licenses instead of medical licences. Obamacare is a goddamn nightmare. Younger people don't realize how much better hospitals were back in the day, and how much easier shit was for the average person.
Ask people you know. Collecting first-hand knowledge is original research, believe it or not.
Its anecdotal. Unless you can get your sample size incredibly high it'll always be a weak link in your data. Great for starting points, and establishing trends if given, but easily dismissable.
Dismissing firsthand experience is a redditism. Especially in place of massaged data.
My mother survived chemo without losing a strand of hair. Firsthand experience tells me chemo doesn't usually result in hairloss. Using only firsthand experience gives you such a fractional picture that it can often end up wildly wrong.
But anything you disagree with is reddit, so you'd prefer to be wrong just to own them.
Your firsthand experience would be howled at by reddit, who would call you a liar and vehemently persecute you because aside from perversion they don't believe in outliers. Because muh science, muh data. Nevermind the reproducibility crisis, of course. That is a deep rabbit hole indeed.
I for one don't care, nor am I sufficiently arrogant as to tell someone not to believe their own eyes.
Except for when the firsthand experience fits with their own narrative and worldview. Because everything they approve of is perfect science and anything otherwise is "word we goggled to sound smart when dismissing it." The same way stats are fake when we don't like it here, except when its 13/52 or 41% then stats/data are infallible truth.
Their retardation doesn't mean we need to gimp ourselves just to be their opposite. Firsthand is greatly beneficial for many things. Writing essays and compiling "credible evidence" like OP is not one, because it fails to hold up when poked. The same way "my gay uncle never molested anyone" doesn't pass versus the sheer number of predators out there.
You shouldn't dismiss firsthand. You need only consider how small of a person you are and how that gives you a very narrow field of view on the world, and factor around that.
Nah, just define your population of interest narrowly.
Stats are fake and gay anyway.
Dont accept the premise: "universal healthcare" is pejorative marxist language. The implication is that "healthcare" is infinitely manifested by the aether. If that were really the case the only reason to be against giving it to everyone is intentional "evil".
Healthcare is a product, for which there is nearly an infinite demand and of a limited supply. Expending resources producing healthcare means there are fewer resources for other priorities.
The question isnt "how to get healthcare to everyone". The real question, as always, is who gets to decide how resources are expended.
Even calling it "healthcare" is buying into enemy frame. A system which would prefer you be 800 pounds and vaccinated than fit and unvaccinated can't rightfully be called "healthcare". The focus is entirely on selling tests and medications that can be billed to insurance and not getting people healthy.
At best it is "symptom management" and "emergency treatment"
Agreed but I'm not smart enough to come up with a word that is both descriptive and doesn't sound totally crazy to normies and isn't so technical that it is too awkward to use.
not being purely "symptom management" sounds nice until you realize that gives license to do stupidity like say "gun violence is a health issue"
A system no matter how its run is never going to give a damn about your health. That's entirely up to the individual. At best you enable people to make choices that might lead to them being healthy.
So I look at a system geared towards pushing products to be inevitable. I never want them to "care" about me; I want them to provide services that I request.
Perhaps, but our system doesn't even do that.
It's not that bad. For me.
And the people who pay for it get fucked over of course. It's ridiculous how much better Medicaid and Obamacare plans are compared to the employer plans that people who work for a living get.
Food is a human necessity. Do we want Universal Government Food? I'm sure some redditors do. But anyways. Water is a necessity, yet most of us still have to pay a water bill. Just because something is essential doesn't mean that it should be socialized. This is how you get women demanding free tampons.
I agree but the other side doesnt. They will never admit their end goal is a totalitarian USSR-type state.
Yeah I don't know if they know it. Tyranny comes through 1000 cuts.
You also have people fundamentally ignorant of economics. It doesnt' help that the government engages in funny money, divorcing currency from its purpose, convincing the tankies there is unlimited resources if only they could divert them from the rich.
I can say my employers' insurance plans have gone up a lot since Obama care enactment.
Of course, they had already been going up up up for a long time. That was the lion's share of the the problem Obamacare was supposed to solve. The other part was the preexisting condition aspect.
Obamacare simply forces taxpaying citizens to subsidize the health insurance of people who were deemed "uninsurable" by the medical industry. This was accomplished by further empowering Big Medical to fuck everyone else over. Nothing was done to stop the problems in healthcare/pharma/insurance that caused the prices to spiral up for decades.
So, even if it is difficult to find data to show that prices went up at a higher annual rate than they already were - it is an undeniable fact that prices did not go down at all.
Exactly. At best it failed at what the people wanted it to do, and yet people still defend it. I say failed at what the people wanted because I suspect in terms of shifting funny money around and providing some gibs to blue state degenerates it succeeded. Legislation is like war: what they tell you it's for is usually bullshit, but if you follow the money you can often figure out what the real motives were.
I'll preface this with the following: Since you mention essay I'm assuming this is school-related? If so, do not - under any circumstances - say that Obamacare increased insurance prices. Because that is (virtually) impossible to prove unless you can somehow get a letter from some insurance company executive outright stating that. And without some solid proof, a biased professor will just slap a "correlation does not equal causation" stamp on that section of your paper and start taking points off.
That said, Obamacare did increase costs. And while you can't say that in an academic setting what you can say is something like "Obamacare did nothing to address increasing insurance costs and in a number of cases those costs have increased faster than pre-Obamacare". Because that is easily provable by looking at trends over time. One source, for example, is right here Health care costs in the US have been going up faster than inflation for decades, and if you look at the graphs towards the bottom of that link you'll notice there is no slowing down in the growth and a suspicious spike from 2010-2011, almost as if some bill was signed into law in 2010 which impacted things greatly.
If you want actual firm data, probably the best way to do it is how Ahaus667 suggested - grab single HMO plans from several health insurance companies from several years over the last few decades and compare prices over time. Only potential issue there is that what the plans cover will have changed, in large part due to a number of laws - most notably Obamacare - mandating more things be covered and more people be covered. But, there's not much you can do about that.
Take a single independent hmo plan from 2004 and compare it to a single independent hmo plan today. Premiums skyrocketed, coverages shrunk, and costs increased. Obamacare made it near impossible for non corporate healthcare and criminalized not buying healthcare. This was intentional on two fronts to make more enforced red tape costs on small businesses and to make more people who would pay for their own healthcare take corporate jobs. That’s why “benefits” became the big talking point for media selling crappy soul sucking jobs. This same model is also currently being used to monopolize hospitals, government forces hospitals to spend stupid amounts of money on administration and updating to regulations so the only answer is to mass conglomerate hospitals to cover initial overhead. This is all a house of cards made by politicians who couldn’t give a flying fuck on how it impacts citizens because they get promised a corporate parachute on the way out.
My parent's premiums tripled and the deductible doubled. They ended up switching to shitty obamacare because it was all they could afford. Happened right when my father got really sick for the first time in his life. He's still pissed. Paid in all those years and never got anything out. Massive grift.
Without looking up statistics, I'd say it is self-evidently true: in a free market a product must at a bare minimum have greater perceived net value than $0 - the customer must believe they are better off buying the product than not. But when the government will fine you for not buying the product, now the product doesn't have to make you better off, it only has to be less harmful than the fine.
I have no first hand experience with premiums but I can tell you that the benefits of the plans became almost nonexistent. Before Bathhouse Barry came along and fucked it up my mom's insurance covered the cost of a primary care visit minus a $20 copay for example. After his bullshit took effect it didn't pay a cent until you reached your unreasonably high deductible. Short of a catastrophe that never happens so in effect paying premiums is throwing money down the toilet.
Yes.
Next question please...
My insurance premiums went up shortly thereafter. Seems as plausible an explanation as any.
Yes. By necessity as the insurance had to cover hundreds if not thousands of new conditions and the Obamacare law also restructured how medical insurance was calculated and paid out (EG it couldn't be a major profit center) The whole point of it was to make private medicine very difficult and messy to navigate so that they could race in and "save us" again by "simplifying" it all with a universal system... created of course by these same people.
To that end the actual costs and charges are BURIED so that it's very difficult to crack the money flow and actual costs.
That's by design.
Note Trump and the GOP had passed the law that said all medical practices and charges had to be listed up front by the hospitals.
As soon as Biden got in that regulation was suspended and I believe the law got repealed... curious that...
To anyone wondering, I finally found evidence that wasn't from a conservative news source. I even asked my professor about the source and he said it is acceptable for the essay. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170123005296/en/Average-Individual-Health-Insurance-Premiums-Increased-99-Since-2013-the-Year-Before-Obamacare-Family-Premiums-Increased-140-According-to-eHealth.com-Shopping-Data.