Sam Baker warns that individuals “who decide to stick with the coverage they’ve already gotten through Obamacare, rather than switching plans, are at risk for some of the biggest premium spikes anywhere in the system”:
Insurance plans generally raise their premiums every year, but those costs are just the tip of the iceberg for millions of Obamacare enrollees. A series of other, largely invisible factors will also push up many consumers’ premiums.
In some cases, even if an insurance company doesn’t raise its rates at all, its customers could still end up owing thousands of dollars more for their premiums. It’s all a byproduct of complicated technical changes triggered, ironically enough, by the law’s success at bolstering competition among insurers.
Many consumers will need to switch plans in order to keep their costs steady, but health care experts question how many people will do that.
Cohn hopes the administration is prepared for this issue:
The key to solving this problem is education and outreach. The Administration has to make sure consumers understand their situations when they first choose next year’s plans. Many will have to go back to healthcare.gov, so that they can find out exactly what policies are available next year and how much financial assistance, if any, they are entitled to get. These people may be glad they checked, because of the savings they can realize. But they’ll have to make the effort to shop and they’re not going to do that if nobody tells them.
Can the Administration get that message across? Can it make the relevant information easy to find? Its performance leading up to last year’s open enrollment period doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Drum chimes in:
In broad terms, this is yet another bit of fallout from the sausage-making process that created Obamacare. In order to get a bill passed, it had to satisfy lots and lots of interest groups. In order to satisfy those interest groups, the structure of the program was made complex. And then, barnacles were added to barnacles to further satisfy everyone. The result is stuff like this. In narrower terms, this might have a technical fix: add a few steps to the auto-renewal process that make the cost of renewing more transparent.
Sprung calms fears by noting that “there’s tremendous churn in the individual market”:
Many will have found jobs that offer insurance; some will become eligible for Medicaid; some will marry or move and need to select a new plan in any case. In November 2013, healthcare scholars Rick Curtis and John Graves estimated (with some caveats) that just 42 percent of Americans eligible for subsidized exchange coverage at end of 2014 (i.e., the upcoming open enrollment season) were eligible in the prior year. That doesn’t quite tell us what percentage of those currently enrolled in subsidized exchange plans will not be seeking coverage for 2015, but it gives an idea of the degree of turnover.
Others who won’t be affected by this potential disproportionate price hike include those whose current plan doesn’t lose benchmark status, those who bought plans that were not benchmark plans, and those who have established relationships with ACA navigators or with brokers (most of whom report they’re still hearing from customers who need help using their current plans) and reach out to them before re-upping.
The Dish 