There are still nearly three months until ObamaCare’s next enrollment season and it is already shaping up to be a disaster. Over the past week, reports from New Jersey, Michigan, Mississippi and Illinois detailed the skyrocketing premium increases customers face in the year ahead.
For the 250,000 ObamaCare consumers in New Jersey, insurance premiums will increase up to 26 percent next year.
Rate filings made public this week show that health insurance premiums for individual customers appear to be rising faster than health care costs, as props in the law to help insurers weather the market’s early turbulence are removed.
In Michigan, 345,000 people face an average 17.3 percent premiums increase:
Of the 14 insurers with individual market plans, 10 are seeking increases exceeding 10%. They include a proposed 13.9% average increase by Priority Health, 18.7% by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, 16.8% by Health Alliance Plan and 39.2% by Humana.
This morning, The Associated Press reported that Mississippi’s insurance commission approved an average rate increase of 43 percent for one of the two health insurers selling plans on the ObamaCare exchange:
Commissioner Mike Chaney said Thursday he approved the increase for Kentucky-based Humana because actuaries project a sharp increase in costs and because he feared Humana would pull out of Mississippi. That would leave Mississippians in a broad swath of counties without anyone selling federally-subsidized insurance.
Earlier in the week, AR2 highlighted ObamaCare failures in the state of Illinois, which will lead to higher costs and health care coverage disruptions for those across the state.
ObamaCare continues to wreak havoc on the people that the law was designed to help. After four years of continued failures, it’s clear the Obama administration would rather saddle people with skyrocketing health premiums and fewer coverage options than scrapping this perpetually disastrous law.