...falling, not rising.
The news comes within two months of the midterms (which may be coincidental) and there it is: health insurance premiums in key markets are going down nearly 10%.
That is not normal; health-insurance premiums nearly always go up and up and up. They rarely, if ever, decrease.
But analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation have scoured insurers rate filings and find that premiums for Obamacare's benchmark plan will decrease, on average, by 0.8 percent across 16 large cities. That could be early evidence that a key premise of Obamacare is working: insurers are competing on the marketplaces, and that could be driving health insurance prices down.The Kaiser Family Foundation published data on what exchange premiums will look like at 2015, using insurers' rate filings in 16 large cities. They looked at the price of the second-lowest cost silver plan in each market.
This is know as the benchmark plan under Obamacare and it's important — the government uses its price to figure out the size of each shopper's subsidy. The health-care law has set limits for how much it expects people of different incomes to pay for the benchmark plan before the federal government subsidizes the rest.
KFF found that, on average, these benchmark premiums would decrease by 0.8 percent in 2015. ...Vox
Kaiser looked at the dynamic behind the decrease and found that real competition works. The old system of insurance cartels has been defeated, maybe permanently. The federal government -- that is, the taxpayer -- catches a real break.
The decrease in premiums isn't just good for Healthcare.gov shopper, its good for the federal budget. The amount the government has to pay in subsidies is tethered to the price of the benchmark plan — the plan that's falling, on average, by 0.8 percent. When the price of that plan goes down, so does the government's per person spending obligation. ...Vox
