Premiums are going up significantly for insurance plans sold through Covered California, the state-run insurance exchange set up through the Affordable Care Act.
The 1.4 million Californians enrolled in the system will see their monthly rates rise by an average of 13.2 percent next year. That's a stark contrast to the first two years of the ACA, when California was able to hold insurers to 4 percent annual increases.
Thirteen percent is far lower than many of the proposed premium hikes that insurers around the country are submitting to state insurance commissioners and the federal regulators for next year. Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma are asking for increases of 63 percent, 60 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
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In California it was Blue Cross and Anthem — which claim over half of all of the state's Obamacare beneficiaries — that drove the big increase. Blue Cross plans increased their rates by 19 percent and Anthem's increased 17 percent.
Kaiser Permanente, the giant California-based nonprofit insurer, only increased its rates by 6 percent.
The executive director of the state exchange told Kaiser Health News that the rate increases just barely allowed the insurers to turn a profit.
"This increase is a little higher than expected, since California seemed to have a healthier population than many other states," Kathy Hempstead, director of health coverage issues at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told Kaiser.
The same story will play out throughout the country, where double-digit increases in 2017 are likely to be the rule, rather than the exception. Rising health costs and a pool of Obamacare policyholders that remains older and sicker than insurers and the Obama administration have hoped for are driving the increases, experts say.
Getting millions of uninsured millennials to enroll in ACA plans remains an elusive goal for the administration, which recently announced that it was going to begin reaching out to young people whose tax records indicate they paid a penalty for going without insurance.
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