Ever since Obamacare became law, I have been counseling states not to establish the law’s health insurance “exchanges,” in part because:
to create an Exchange is to create a taxpayer-funded lobbying group dedicated to fighting repeal. An Exchange’s employees would owe their power and their paychecks to this law. Naturally, they would aid the fight to preserve the law.
California was the first state both to reject my advice and to prove my point.
Officials operating California’s exchange–which the marketing gurus dubbed “Covered California“–recently and deliberately misled the entire nation about the cost of health insurance under Obamacare.
They claimed that health plans offered through Covered California in 2014 will cost the same or less than health insurance costs today. “The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” they wrote, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”
See? No rate shock. California’s top Obamacare bureaucrat, Peter Lee, declared his agency had hit “a home run for consumers.” Awesome!
Unfortunately, anyone who knows anything about health insurance or Obamacare knew instantly that this claim was bogus, for three reasons.
- Obamacare or no Obamacare, health insurance premiums rise from year to year, and almost always by more than 2 percent. So right off the bat, the fact that Covered California claimed that premiums would generally fall means they’re hiding something.
- Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover all “essential health benefits” will force most people who purchase coverage on the “individual” market (read: directly from health insurance companies) to purchase more coverage than they purchase today. This will increase premiums for most everyone in that market.
- Obamacare’s community-rating price controls (also known as its “pre-existing conditions” provisions) will increase premiums for some consumers (i.e., the healthy) and reduce premiums for others (i.e., the sick). So it is misleading for Covered California to focus on averages because averages can hide some pretty drastic premium increases and decreases.