For 2 adults, our 2024 ACA Bronze policy premium will be $2,057 per month or about $25,000 per year.
The family deductible is $19,000 per year.
The reason premiums skyrocketed is because it moved all those who were “high risk” and expensive patients into the small individual market. Pre-ACA, 35 states ran subsidized high risk insurance pools – post ACA, all of those patients were moved in to the small individual market insurance pools. Another 25% of the uninsured had pre-existing conditions – post ACA they migrated to either the tiny ACA individual pools, or expanded Medicaid. The effect was to turn the small individual market into a large high risk/high cost insurance pool with astronomical premiums and deductibles.
In the last 3 years, Congress began to offer a sliding subsidy (don’t know where – yet – we fit into that) when they were forced to acknowledge that ACA individual market policies were unaffordable to almost everyone.
MIT expert health care policy analyst Jonathan Gruber, architect of the ACA, and famous for saying in public they used obfuscated language to get the ACA past the “stupid American voter” – is still an arrogant asshole.
His ACA design failed but there is no political will to fix it as the number afflicted by this is in the low millions – Congress doesn’t give a damn.
