Inside Track
ObamaCare Rate Hikes: Bad News for Democrats
On November 1, annual enrollment in the ObamaCare exchanges will open, and it won’t be good news for consumers. Insurers are expected to increase their premiums significantly. It could also be bad news for Democrats. Voters will be going to the polls one week later to elect a new president and determine the makeup of one-third of the Senate and the entire House of Representatives.
The exchanges and co-ops, for a variety of reasons, simply cannot attract enough young, healthy people to foot the bill for covering the old and the sick. Exchange coverage is expensive, in part because of ObamaCare’s many mandates on insurers, and the law’s subsidies are insufficient to offset these costs. Exchange plans are often stingy, with high deductibles and narrow provider networks. The combination of these two factors makes paying the individual-mandate penalty often a much better deal than buying insurance. In addition, the law’s mandate that insurers cover young-adult children on their parents’ employer-sponsored policies has taken millions of prospective young customers out of the market.
Democrats have real concerns about the next several months. Given that their party bears sole responsibility for ObamaCare, any negative news about the law plays directly into Republicans’ hands. Republicans have argued for repealing and replacing ObamaCare, though they have often hedged on just exactly what their replacement would be, perhaps fearing assaults from both the Left (that the plan is insufficiently socialistic) and the Right (that it remains too much so). This gives Democrats an opening to fight back.
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