I will not argue that health care insurance premiums are high. Insurance companies are for profit businesses even if they claim to be non-profits. They have to make their payroll and pay their financial commitments just like ever other business. Their financial commitments happen to be paying for services provided to YOU through doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies.
Their premiums are based on their best guess of what services the global YOU are going to need and use. They negotiate costs with ALL service providers, and service providers have different rate structure for those with or without coverage.
Part of the 20,000 page ACA was backup protection to the insurance companies to protect them from excessive losses from the mandate that they must take all applicants.
Our current Federal Administration (House, Senate, & White House) by flapping their gums about repeal and replace the ACA and about not paying the backup protection to the insurance companies has created instability and vulnerability in the insurance market.
Everyone pays for that in higher premiums. Write letters to your Federal Administrators (House, Senate, & White House) and tell them to move on to something they that can agree on and fix.
I’m not sure what protections you think were in the ACA. The only one I know of was a profit sharing early in the ACA implementation. The plan was intended to help insurance carriers that lost money in the ACA roll out by taking money from carries that profited and distributing it to carriers that lost money.
The problem with that plan was that zero insurance carriers made money on ACA. They all lost money. Some were spending nearly $2 in claims for every $1 they brought in. So there was no profit sharing to bail out carriers.
There was also a rule in the ACA that carriers cannot use money from other products (your employer’s plan) to subsidize their ACA plans in perpetuity. That was a good thing in my view.
Reminder, locally, Preferred One almost ended up in receivership after the first year of the ACA. Luckily for them, a couple of care systems (providers) with deep pockets bailed them out by injecting millions of dollars, Fairview and North Memorial. Although, North Memorial isn’t exactly rolling in dough compared to Fairview and Allina.
Preferred One has still not returned to the ACA market since that failure.
IIRC, Medica has pulled out of much of the state’s ACA market to protect itself.
HP and BSBS have limited their exposure to MN’s ACA market to protect themselves.
Across the country, almost all of the co-ops that were supposed to save the ACA as a model of economy ended up bankrupt, some before the first year of ACA ended. There wasn’t a safety net available for them. In some cases, the care systems ended up not being paid when a co-op failed.
As consumers we have myopic views of the ACA. Sadly the only thing people remember is that now we are coverage for everything and we won’t let go of that coverage in the interest of saving the industry from turning into the VA, aka single payer.
