Will ObamaCare double your health insurance premiums?

In other words, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, ObamaCare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.... [For 40-year-olds,] ObamaCare will increase individual-market premiums by an average of 116 percent. For both 25-year-olds and 40-year-olds, then, Californians under ObamaCare who buy insurance for themselves will see their insurance premiums double. [Forbes]

Was Avik really using teaser rates published on the internet by eHealthInsurance.com as his point of comparison? I mean, you don't have to be a healthcare policy expert to know that websites like eHealthInsurance.com always flash low rates in front of you — prices that maybe one person in a thousand might actually hope to achieve — to tickle the interest of a potential customer.

It's not that the flashing low prices are necessarily false as there is always going to be someone who can qualify for the exceptionally low rate — although even they will often find that the actual details of what is covered and not covered may be far less beneficial than they might hope.... Have you ever suffered a migraine headache? If you have, be prepared for a substantial increase over the teaser price stated on a website like eHealthInsurance.com. Ever experience a summer of hay fever? Your rate will skyrocket as a result. Did you have acne as a teenager? Uh-oh... price is going up. [Forbes]

The fact that ObamaCare dramatically raises premiums on young people is a big deal, because the majority of uninsured people are young. It's the fact that insurance is already so expensive that leads so many young people to opt out. They're perfectly healthy; they don't have a lot of money; but they're being asked to shell out thousands of bucks for policies they won't use. And ObamaCare's solution to this problem is... to force them to pay more? We'll see how that goes. [Forbes]

Insurance bids from eHealthInsurance are for new customers only. Insurers who sell to individuals — that is, insurers who sell in the "non-group market" — frequently raise rates dramatically, and unpredictably, because a particular group of customers have become too expensive to insure. In other words, if you buy on eHealthInsurance, you might get a reasonable rate the first year, only to experience eye-popping increases a year or two later. That won't happen on the exchanges, because, under ObamaCare, insurers can't charge different prices to new and existing customers.

But the most amazing part of Roy's entry was what it didn't say.... He said absolutely nothing — not a single word! — about the federal subsidies available to people with incomes below 400 percent of the poverty line. (That's about $46,000 a year for a single adult, or $94,000 for a family of four.)... *The majority of people buying coverage on the exchanges will get subsidies.* It's difficult to be certain about the overall effect on all Californians buying coverage... but it's entirely possible (I'd say likely) that, with the subsidies, the majority of people buying on the exchange next year will pay less than they pay for insurance today. [New Republic]

ObamaCare — is designed to be a fiscal transfer from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, and the rich to the poor. It's not just ObamaCare: Any system that shifts health expenditures from the private sector to the public sector causes transfers like this. If we had no government financing of health care at all, healthy people with high incomes would spend a very small percentage of their income on health care, and the sick poor would spend a large percentage. If we had a fully socialized system where the government paid for everything, rich people would bear most of the cost of providing health care to everyone. And systems that involve a split of public and private expenditure — including ObamaCare — have distributional effects somewhere in between.

What makes ObamaCare's redistribution look odd, even "shocking," is that the law was structured to move much of the redistribution off the government's books.... instead of hiding the transfer from the young and healthy as part of a tax bill that finances the whole government, ObamaCare causes it to show up in the form of a higher insurance "premium." That tax increase will make some young and healthy people worse off. But they would also be worse off if the government provided direct health care subsidies to the old and the sick and used a broad-based tax like a payroll tax to finance those subsidies. In fact, that's how we finance Medicare, which is a huge fiscal transfer from the young to the old. [Business Insider]