The 2019 Obamacare enrollment period begins today amidst a surprising bit of good news. For the first time since the exchanges opened in 2014, average premiums for benchmark silver plans are not going to increase. In fact, average benchmark premiums are slated to decrease by 1.5%.
Insurers aren’t just lowering premiums; they’re also increasing their participation in Obamacare exchanges across the country, an improvement from the insurer departures of years past. Across the country, people shopping on the individual market will get to choose from a wider variety of more affordable plans.
But not in New York. Here, it’s business as usual: For the umpteenth year, the Cuomo administration is doing its darndest to hold rates unnaturally low. But the gaming of the system is catching up to New Yorkers, because premiums can’t be constrained forever.
Premiums are dropping this year around the country mainly because insurers raised them so much last year — an average of 37% nationwide. 2018’s excessive rate hikes were driven by insurers’ fears that the market would collapse if Congress repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate. Following conventional wisdom, they assumed that without the high premiums collected from healthy people, there would be nothing left to subsidize those with pre-existing conditions.
Continue reading the entire piece here at New York Daily News
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Tim Rice is deputy director for health policy at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News