Via @McKinsey: Low-price exchange plans ↑ premiums, high-price ↓. What you’d expect in a newly competitive market. pic.twitter.com/ThHgjFJsPf
— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) September 24, 2014
The important thing to remember is that 2014 was a beta test year for Obamacare. Some insurers went into the market with loss leader membership build strategies, others went in with a reasonable price sustainability model, others went in with a hyper cautious approach. Some insurers had optimistic pricing models, others projected a much sicker enrolled population than they actually got.
2015 is the first significant readjustment and the market is acting pretty much as we should expect markets for minimally differentiated products. Plans that were underpriced are seeing their pricing go up, plans that are overpriced are seeing cost reductions. It is almost like the market structure could work.
Baud
Did you write about this yet (via WaPo)?
Richard Mayhew
@Baud: Not yet, as I don’t have a particularly good or unique hook on that type of story. I know my market area is seeing a new entry (a national company with local infrastructure that stayed out in 2014), and all of the incumbents are offerning more flavors, but this is a story but I don’t know how to make it particularly interesting.
Wag
The Invisable Hand. How does it work?
The only people surprised by this are “free market ” republican shills. For the rest of us, this is about what we were expecting.
gratuitous
A very useful little bit of information to keep filed away. I know that I’ve already seen ads yawping about premium increases (from PACs, not candidates). The ads are, of course, carefully barbered of any context that might indicate the plan was underpriced to begin with.
different-church-lady
I am looking forward to the day when we all pay the same amount for our overpriced, overrated, under-competent heath care.
Frankensteinbeck
I can’t help but see Obamacare as the triumph of the center-left. Regulations do work, it’s never too late to make a difference, helping people helps people, the poor are not the enemy, competition is a good thing, ‘free’ markets destroy competition, and it’s amazing what you can do if you think carefully and don’t take your ball and go home just because you can’t get your dogmatic ideal. There are a Hell of a lot of problems left to fix, but this attempt did what it was meant to and helped a lot.
Angela
OT- Anyone have any ideas why Eric Holder is resigning today?
JPL
@Angela: I just signed on and found out from Talking Points. I’m streaming MSNBC now. They are saying it has been an open secret.
SatanicPanic
@Angela: He’s taking the fall for Obama’s dastardly gun running schemes!
Amir Khalid
@Angela:
Per the TPM story, Holder has been planning to resign since at least February, but back then DoJ disputed New Yorker’s story reporting this. I suspect he has already stayed on, at Obama’s request, longer than he wanted to.
Angela
Thanks all! I wasn’t able to do the research, but I knew where to go for a quick answer. BJ community for the win.
gratuitous
@SatanicPanic: Shows what you know, you commie. It’s clearly a diversion from . . . Benghazi!!1!eleventy!!
Linnaeus
@Frankensteinbeck:
It’s a start, which is why I supported it, but I don’t think it’s best model for what it aims to do. It’s what was available at the time.