Nevertheless, you raise legitimate arguments. However, your arguments pertain to what might happen in the future and don’t really have anything to do with the premium hikes referred to in the NYT story, hikes that have already taken place. My point was that those premium increases have very little if anything to do with the ACA. Dan’s post, which implied that they are linked to the ACA, was part of a regrettable trend on the right to blame every bad thing in the universe on the ACA, even with no evidence of a link whatsoever. That’s a trend that has more to do with politics than policy, and one that I don’t think advances the ball on making our health system better.

I would be curious if Dan or any of the commenters could read the NY Times article and talk about why they interpret it as saying that the Affordable Care Act means, or is causing, the big premium increases discussed.

Comment by Brubeck — January 9, 2013 @ 11:04 am – January 9, 2013

Very simple.

From the article:

The practice of medical underwriting — being able to consider the health of a prospective policy holder before deciding whether to offer coverage and what rate to charge — will no longer be permitted after 2014 under the health care law.

Let us put that in terms of a different insurance type.

The practice of risk underwriting — being able to consider the driving record, accident prevalence, and tickets received for a prospective policy holder before deciding whether to offer coverage and what rate to charge — will no longer be permitted after 2014 under the health care law.

In other words, the insurance companies must now automatically offer the same level of coverage to a 50-year-old driver with a spotless record and a 16-year-old driver with two injury accidents and five speeding tickets — at the same rate for both of them.

Since the rate has to cover the highest possible risk, the rate will rise to the level required to cover the highest possible risk for both individuals. Simple math. If before the sixteen-year-old would have paid $500 a month and the fifty-year-old $50 a month, then the rate will be tweaked to $275 each.

Or put simply, Brubeck, congratulations; your support of the ACA means that someone like yourself who doesn’t drink, do drugs, eat too much, smoke, or have promiscuous unprotected sex, will now be paying the same premium rate as an alcoholic obese meth addict with HIV.

Because you will be covering that person’s bills, and paying for that person’s lack of responsibility.

In short, Obama sold you a bill of goods and put you on the hook to pay for other peoples’ bad decisions. Aren’t you proud of yourself?

San Fran Nan[cy Pelosi] famously said “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” It sounds so ditzy on the surface, but in many respects, she’s absolutely right. Unelected bureaucrats get to define what the inner workings of the law say, do, and how they behave. If they say Big Macs get a surcharge to help pay for the law, then they will—at least until Federal courts say otherwise.

To that end, the current lawsuits over the ACA are only the tip of the iceberg which is to come. To suggest that people should “work with the law” is innane, because the law says what the rulemakers say it does. How does the average person (much less businesses affected) know which rules apply when? [Except for perhaps a new industry to provide subscription-based updates to the law as they are announced.] Plus, the Obama Administration is cutting down the time for public comment on many new rules so that there is barely 20 days in some instances before many rules take effect.

In addition, many states (including my own) are considering opting out of the Medicaid expansion because the offer for the Federal government to pay for the exapansion is being seen as a bait-and-switch tactic which will become an unfunded mandate when the Feds decide that the budget deficit will be magically reduced by eliminating future Federal funding for the expansion.

This law is a complete Trojan Horse in several respects. This is why it is so odiously obnoxious. However, the proponents only want to stress the sugar-coated glazed carrots in the Act, not the sticks in the eye which will come around later—and mostly after its principal supporter is out of office.

The other problem with the ACA is that it was written without anyone actually voting for it having the time to really read it and evaluate the various implications of the law.

Two huge problems already are developing. The ACA only requires employers to provide insurance for full time employees. Employers have already started to shift as many workers to part time as they can to avoid having to provide benefits. The other is that the IRS just clarified that employers only have to provide the employees benefits at an affordable rate-not their dependents. So an employee might get their insurance for about $200 or so a month, but may be asked to pay the entire cost of the dependent portion of the plan (my former employer did it this way-I paid about $75 a month for my insurance but could not afford to add my husband or kids to the plan because it would have been $1,200 a month (more than I was paid at the time).