NEW YORK TIMES: Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014… (more)
EDITOR: The country is being bled dry with health insurance costs now twice as much as other advanced economies while the quality of health care is rated on the level of Cuba, around 13th in the world.
The whole system is an anachronism resulting from the introduction of company paid health benefits during the Second World War to get around wage freezes. Fifty-two percent of health care is far more efficiently provided in the USA under government programs. By simply adopting a variation of Medicare For Everyone the cost likely could be cut by a third.
The citizenry does not understand that they are giving up about $3 an hour in pay for ever more inadequate health care benefits. As an employer, we are embarrassed to see costs jump while essential benefits diminish or disappear.
