In West Virginia, Obamacare premiums would spike $1,536 on average if stimulus aid expires.
Without the current subsidy program, our costs would be approximately $20,000/year for two adults with a massively high deductible.
By 2023, our premiums will likely be $2,000 per month for 2 adults. No kidding. These are not typical corporate-style plans – but extremely expensive ACA compliant, mostly catastrophic coverage, with limited or no benefits “out of network” where that can mean no “in network” providers outside your own county. In other words, many ACA policy holders lack a national insurance plan. In fact, many policies say they have no coverage for out of network hospitalization and surgery (specific words are “benefit not provided”). So if you are hurt while traveling in the U.S, tough shit. It is not even covered as an “out of network” benefit (I verified this with an insurance company and an insurance broker).
The ACA turned the individual market into a large high-risk pool. Pre ACA, 35 states ran their own high risk insurance pools – all of these people were merged into the ACA individual market – because there were no longer any pre-existing condition exclusions. Additionally, an estimated 25% of the pre-ACA uninsured had pre-existing conditions. A large part of this group was also merged into the individual market. The effect was to turn individual policies into high risk insurance policies – since these high cost patients expenses are shared only with the small individual market.
Basically, a defectively written law (architect Jonathan Gruber is not as bright as he thinks he is). Neither Democrats, who wrote and passed the ACA with a 60-vote super majority, nor the Republicans give a shit about fixing this. They do not care. While the Republicans have no plan, the Democrats have mostly refused to acknowledge these defects – even though a few Democrats know this is the root problem. Openly lying about the ACA (the Democrat’s approach) is no solution either.
