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Do you have any data to support that argument? I'm not an expert, but 5 minutes on google makes it look like premiums have been increasing in a straight line since at least the late 90s.
See figure 1.12 and also this reference.
I honestly don't know how to square those charts with my personal expenses, and the expenses of those around me, any more than I know how to square the official rates of inflation with the same. I don't know how well those indexes capture people's plans getting phased out and replaced with entirely new plans that cost twice as much. I don't know how well those indexes capture the plans raising copays, deductibles, etc so you are getting less and less despite paying more and more. I don't know how well those indexes are capturing the shrinking pool of health service providers that even accept certain plans. Pre-ACA I had zero issue with any doctor I wanted to goto accepting my insurance. Post-ACA they started getting a lot pickier about which plans they take.
Basically, I gotta plead "Lies, damned lies, and statistics".
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Premiums are only one component of healthcare costs. A "straight line" is one thing, the slope of the line is what matters. Family premiums are up 89% since 2008, compared to ~43% cumulative inflation.. Outcomes and features have degraded since ACA, I'd argue.
Your point (the overall rate of change pre-and-post ACA) seems valid. However, I don't think "things continued to get way worse at the same rate" counts as a victory.
Obamacare accelerated the inevitable failure of this healthcare system and was only engineered to be a pernicious trojan horse for single-payer.
The initial argument was:
I agree, the slope of the line is what matters. If your argument is that Obamacare increased premiums, you would expect to see the slope of the line increase after the ACA was passed, correct? Do you agree that that is not what we see, and that the post I was replying to was incorrect, pending them making some kind of rebuttal?
Do you have any data about outcomes deteriorating? That doesn't seem like a straightforward thing to measure.
It doesn't, it counts as Whiningcoil being wrong. You're making a new argument and moving the goalposts.
Maybe. No offense, but I'll believe it when I see data.
WhiningCoil is correct in that the ACA means insurers make more money through larger claims. There's no downward pressure to reduce costs from insurance companies. When they destroy last year's plans and remake new ones (to get around ACA's maximum cost increases!) they just make them more expensive. There's no consequences for introducing a massive headache to everyone, every year, forever.
That's actually not my argument. I agree that the data shows premiums have continually outpaced inflation at the same horrific rate for the past 30 years. Obama promised that the ACA would reduce premiums. The CBO - which is trotted out as "non-partisan" by every NPC every time we're ramming through another enshittification mechanism through our legislature - predicted Premiums would drop by 13% by 2016.
The market competition we were promised was a lie. Instead we've watched massive mergers and regional monopolies emerge. Longer wait times, fewer services at urgent care, the death of the family practice, monopolies on software and technology, deductibles have tripled.
You can't just ask for data as a rebuttal - you would have to be blind to think the system is providing any more value for the money today then it did in 08.
In that vein, you and I both know that there's no "data" to point directly to a trojan horse, but the level of incompetence that the ACA has exhibited could easily count as malice. Almost every single promise was an outright lie, with perhaps the exception of covering the obese smokers who didn't have insurance. It's genuinely difficult to think of a more destructive force in the average american's health and wealth in my lifetime.
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How much of the change in family premiums is due to more elderly dependents?
The rate increase is only slightly higher for family than individuals. They're essentially the same.
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He's definitely right that the ACA puts that cap on non-benefit expenses (including profit), but I would tend to agree that I'm not sure how much that raised premiums. The main thing the ACA did was put the onus on paying for chronically ill people not on medicare/medicaid/Employer insurance on the taxpayer (via APTCs) and the unsubsidized making more than 250% FPL (to some extent) and 400% FPL (to a very large extent).
Not sure why we didn't just put those chronically ill in Medicare like the dialysis population....though eventually you run into the problem that Medicare rates don't sustain providers - commercial population subsidizes. Tricky little issue we have here.
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