Study By Manhattan Institute Shows Healthcare Costs Will Skyrocket

Worried or wondering what’s going to happen to your healthcare costs under Obamacare? It is easy to see why, with insurance premiums, deductibles, and other considerations that everyone seems to have a different answer on.

But fear not, because new research from the Manhattan Institute estimates that insurance costs for young men will rise by 99 percent on average. Rates for younger women, however, will rise between 55 percent to 62 percent, according to the New York think tank.

The exact impact of law on healthcare costs will vary from state-to-state, because different states have had different requirements for what had to be included in health insurance policies in the past. Obamacare overrides these rules and sets a federal overlay that demands a wide array of mandatory coverages. The Manhattan Institute has drawn up an interactive map that may help forecast the rise in cost for individuals.

In North Carolina, for instance, men will get slammed by an average 305 percent rate hike, while women will see extreme increases in Nebraska, paying an average of 237 percent more. For most people, subsidies will not counter the rate shock. According to one of the study’s co-authors Avik Roy, a health care expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute:

You hear all these excuses from the [Obama] administration — that people are exaggerating the effect of the law. But real people are getting notices from their insurers now. My blog is flooded with comments from people saying that they just got a huge premium hike.

The Department of Health and Human Services press release this week forecasting that Obamacare premiums would be 16 percent less than projected, is debunked. The projected costs were estimates that attempted to project the cost of a policy in 2016.

The campaign promise made by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, in which he said that you could keep your old policy fi you like it, is also a flat-out lie. A reporter from CBS who opined online about the impact of the law said that she, too, received a letter from her insurance company that stated, effective ” midnight on December 31, we will discontinue your current plan because it will not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.”

Why exactly did her policy not meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is known? It did not provide maternity benefits., which makes sense considering she is 53 years-old. But that is what many people never seemed to understand. You must pay for coverage, in total, because the system is set up for you to pay costs others cannot pay.

It may sound like a worthy cause, but the consumer if forced to do so, for starters. Not to mention, it isn’t exactly cheap to do so. She wrote, “My premium, the letter added, would go from $209 a month to $348, a 66.5 percent increase that will cost $1,668 annually.” Avik Roy said, “Every one of those provisions sound nice – they sound like you’re protecting the sick and making sure that everyone is covered,” Roy said. “But they drive up the cost structure.”

Men, especially, must understand that the reason they are seeing such a dramatic increase is due to the fact that they must pay for a plan that covers female  healthcare costs. Also, the ability to limit my out-of-pocket costs if a person had a catastrophic ailment got worse under my new Obamacare policy.

Kathy Kristof, the CBS reporter who shared her story, had a policy that paid 100 percent of the cost of annual check-ups and had a $5,000 annual deductible for sick visits and hospital stays. After that annual $5,000 was paid the plan would pay 100 percent of any additional cost. That protected her and others with similar policies from economic devastation in the event of a catastrophic illness, such as cancer.

Kaiser, her insurance company, detailed their Obamacare policy that has a $4,500 deductible, but then covers only 40 percent of medical costs for office visits, hospital stays and drugs. However, out-of-pocket expenses aren’t capped until the policyholder pays $6,350 annually, which may not sound like a good deal more, but the devils in the details.

While the deductible is only another $1,350 – as if that’s not enough – it adds to the additional $1,663 that she and others with that plan are paying in premiums, making her personal healthcare costs under Obamacare skyrocket to $3,018 annually. And, oh yes, this is not exactly the best healthcare policy under Obamacare – it’s the Bronze plan. Premiums for plans that offer lower deductibles and premiums would see healthcare costs that are just under double the healthcare costs of the Bronze plan.

Even though Obamacare was sold as a healthcare reform policy that would address the uninsured while leaving insured folks unscathed, in reality, it barely and inadequately addresses the uninsured at the expense of everyone else. “This is a redistribution of wealth from the healthy to the sick, from the young to the old, from the people who have always had insurance to the uninsured,” Roy said.

A standard policy for wellness and catastrophic coverage for an unexpected, unavoidable ailment or accident could have been provided for a fraction of what Obamacare coverage costs, Roy added. “Obama care forces insurers to offer products that carry all sorts of bells and whistles that most people don’t want but everyone will now need to pay for.”

The president and the Democratic Party own this catastrophe, and so do those who voted for them.