Obamacare Continuing to Cost Marylanders
Health insurance premiums are going up on Maryland, and we have Obamacare to thank.
The Affordable Care Act was supposed to, as the name says, make health care more affordable. It hasn’t. The latest example of that is the Maryland Insurance Administration approving even higher rate hikes for some plans offered by CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and Kaiser Permanente.
The latest round of rate increases for CareFirst is 27%, on top of a 42% increase earlier this year. The state approved an increase of 20.7% for Kaiser in addition to an increase of 22.6% earlier in the year.
The insurance companies say that this price increases are needed to compensate the companies for losing federal cost-sharing reductions. President Trump recently ended these payments to insurance companies.
“Aha!” you may say. “This is evidence of President Trump sabotaging Obamacare so that it won’t work as intended!”
That may be a tempting narrative, but it is wrong. President Trump was following the law by ending these payments. As constitutional law professor Josh Blackman explains, these subsidies were illegal:
Congress has never appropriated the funding for the subsidies, and every penny paid to the insurers is unlawful. For two years congressional Republicans argued the payments were illegal, and they even sued the Obama administration to halt them. Last year, a federal judge agreed, ruling that the payments were unconstitutional.
You can’t blame these price hikes on Donald Trump. Those who wrote and passed the law are fully responsible for them. The structure of the law makes these premium hikes inevitable. Obamacare is fundamentally flawed.
This is something I’ve written about on this blog in the past. Many insurers cannot afford to offer policies under the health insurance regime set up by Obamacare. These companies are leaving the marketplace. Those that remain can only stay in business by hiking prices or relying on government handouts.
The system put in place by Obamacare is unsustainable. The dramatic CareFirst and Kaiser rate increases are a symptom of a much wider problem. It is unfortunate that Democrats in Congress fail to recognize the fundamental flaws with Obamacare and that Republicans cannot agree on ways to fix these flaws. The inability of Congress to act on this issue means that consumers in Maryland and across the U.S. continue to suffer.