COMMENTARY: Obamacare mess in Texas - 55% increase for 2017 Bluecross!

Usually it’s a good thing that everything’s bigger in Texas, but that isn’t true when it comes to health insurance 549b2682040b5.imagepremiums for Obamacare. Recent federal data shows that Texas’ largest insurer on the Obamacare Marketplace exchanges is seeking average premium increases of nearly 60 percent for 2017 — among the highest hikes in the entire country.

At least 600,000 policyholders with Blue Cross Blue Shield may quickly find their insurance coverage is unaffordable. Some may already feel that way: Texans with individual exchange policies through Obamacare this year already saw premiums rise by about 14 percent.

State regulators still must approve the latest request — many major Texan insurers are requesting double-digit premium hikes — but it is all but certain that Texans will feel more financial pain in 2017.

This alone shows that the Affordable Care Act continues to harm the very people it was supposed to help. And premiums are increasing even though health insurers receive billions of dollars distributed by the federal government to try to keep premium hikes low.

These handouts have received little attention until now. Obamacare was essentially designed as one big special-interest giveaway to health insurers, which is why they lobbied so heavily for it. Not only does the law force every American to purchase their products — the so-called “individual mandate” — but it also pads insurers’ bottom lines through a variety of direct subsidies designed to hide the true cost of premiums.

Among them are three programs: risk corridors; reinsurance and risk adjustment. Risk corridors and reinsurance pay insurers for taking on patients with high costs. Risk adjustment redistributes funds from plans with lower-cost enrollees — healthier, younger individuals — to higher-cost ones.

Yet even that wasn’t enough to make Obamacare plans affordable. Despite soaking up billions of dollars, the law is still forcing insurers to boost their premiums or withdraw from the market entirely. And with risk corridors and reinsurance expiring next year, taxpayers will start to see just how unaffordable their insurance truly is.

UnitedHealthcare, which this year covered 80 percent of enrollees on Texas’s Obamacare exchange, in 2017 will be departing the market altogether. And many looking for new insurance plans already found their choices severely limited when Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas ceased offering PPO plans on the exchange in 2016.

The reason given for premium rate hikes is the “magnitude of losses” that Blue Cross Blue Shield’s exchange plans have faced over the last two years. In other words, even with reinsurance and risk corridors, the costs of providing coverage are too high. Yet the federal government is trying to urge Texans and others facing potentially skyrocketing premiums not to be alarmed. “Consumers will have the final word when they vote with their feet during open enrollment,” which runs from Nov. 1-Jan. 31, 2017, the federal Department of Health and Human Services noted.

That’s definitely true, but not in the way the federal government intended. One Texas insurance broker warns the premium increases will be “a very big disruptor of the market,” falling especially hard on rural communities. Since consumer subsidies can’t possibly keep up with the premium hikes, many people will be encouraged to forgo insurance entirely. The fines on those without coverage will often end up cheaper than ever-more-pricey premiums.

The latest announcement from Blue Cross Blue Shield makes this outcome all the more likely. It’s telling that not even bailouts could keep the company from requesting a staggering 60 percent average premium hike. Yet even before that, Texans were already hurting from the constant premium price spikes under the Affordable Care Act. Just this once, it’d be nice if everything wasn’t bigger in the Lone Star State.

Jerome Greener is the Texas state director of Americans for Prosperity.

JEROME GREENER | GUEST COLUMNIST  Jul 13, 2016  Originally published in The Monitor