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- A Good Obamacare Story
So I bitch a lot about my Obamacare policy and its limitations, but there are people who buy their insurance on the exchange and have good stories to tell. I heard one a few weeks ago from a family friend. He’s in his mid-50s, retired after selling his business a couple of years ago (the business involved a lot of manual labor, so that makes sense). He does odd jobs around town, but otherwise he doesn’t have much income.
His monthly premium for his policy is around $40-50 after premium credits. A couple of months ago, he had a hypertensive crisis out of the blue. He was hospitalized for days and it took a while to get his blood pressure under control. After he got out of the hospital, he lost a ton of weight and looks good.
If he hadn’t been insured, his retirement would have been destroyed by a major hospital bill. However, he, and probably me, will be paying a lot more for our exchange policies under the Big Billionaire Blowjob.
Health insurance premiums are going way up next year for people who buy their insurance on Healthcare.gov or the state-based marketplaces, according to an analysis out Friday.
The average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium, according to the analysis from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.
[…]
This year, instead of talking about rising drug costs or hospital charges, insurance companies were talking about federal policy, Cox says. "Pretty much every insurance company is talking about the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA markets."
It turns out that people liked those lower premiums. "The number of people signing up for coverage has more than doubled," says Cox, who directs the Program on the Affordable Care Act at KFF. In January, enrollment hit a record 24 million. That high enrollment helped drive the uninsured rate to its lowest level ever.
The CBO thinks that 8.2 millions people will become uninsured due to the premium spike.
Our friend isn’t a Trumper, but I know a number of them who buy insurance from the exchange, cheap, because anyone who runs an ag business and has a decent accountant looks pretty low income on paper (and probably in fact). I suppose their loyalty to Daddy Trump and the media they consume will just ignore the pain that a number of people will feel, but it’s a big deal.
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