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Originally Posted by dinopoker
If they don't repeal the good parts of the ACA then without the individual mandate the premiums for policy holders will go through the roof.
The thing is, they've already sent premiums higher thanks to taking away cost-sharing reduction subsidies last year, by 15 percent or so. Trump's brilliant idea of playing will-he-or-won't-he-film-at-11 style of managing this injected additional uncertainty into the market. Insurers respond to uncertainty by raising premiums.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dinopoker
They're banking on the fact that people will see their premiums holding steady and that will be enough, and who cares that a bunch of pre-existing condition people are gonna die?
The net effect of the decision to not defend the Texas case is just another dollop of uncertainty, and I mentioned how insurers respond. Even in a world where virtually everything goes Trump's way, there's no way that pre-ex gets removed this year -- the case will take too long to wend through the system with appeals and all.
What you *should* be paying attention to in terms of what can happen now is the loosening of rules on short-term plans, which are scratch-and-sniff underbelly imitations of actual insurance.
Short-term plans discriminate on pre-existing conditions, usually feature fairly strict lifetime limits and are generally useless for anything except maybe accidents which cost more than $6,000 in care but somehow don't involve rehab - and they tend to pay about 50c - 60c of every dollar they take in back out in health care claims; it's 85c, minimum, for Obamacare plans.
These short-term plans are projected to increase premiums for Obamacare plans somewhere in the 15-25% range on top of other policy changes.
The short-term plans are cheaper, but I cannot tell you enough how much they suck as actual insurance products.
Bottom line - there's no real plan Rs have put forward that would lower premiums this year, unless you're willing to move to abjectly sh&tty health plans.