Health Insurers: We’ll Deny Coverage For Pre-Existing Conditions If Health Mandate Is Repealed

[Bill USA]

6. Republicans exaggerate the increase in private health insurance premiums caused by the new law.

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/10/factchecking-health-insurance-premiums/

( all emphases are my own_Bill USA)

Health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored family plans jumped a startling 9 percent from 2010 to 2011, and Republicans have blamed the federal health care law. But they exaggerate. [font color="blue"]The law — the bulk of which has yet to be implemented — has caused only about a 1 percent to 3 percent increase in premiums, according to several independent experts.[/font] The rest of the 9 percent rise is due to rising health care costs, as usual.

Furthermore, the increase caused by the law is a result of the increased benefits it requires, a factor Republicans generally ignore. So far, insurance companies have been required to do the following:

■ Cover preventive care without copays or deductibles.
■ Allow adult children to stay on parents’ policies until age 26.
■ Increase annual coverage limits.
■ Cover children without regard for preexisting conditions.

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...experts we spoke with weren’t too surprised by this year’s findings. They point out that the 3 percent growth from 2009 to 2010 was unusually low. While it’s tough to discern a clear, long-term trend in the growth rates, the annual increase was holding steady at around 5 percent or 5.5 percent from 2007 to 2009. The growth rates had been at 10 percent and higher from 2000 to 2004. (See our chart below, which uses Kaiser’s employer survey numbers.) So, the 3 percent growth rate was “abnormally low,” says John Sheils, senior vice president of The Lewin Group, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that operates independently of the health care company. He says it “would stand to reason that we’d get a boost” this year, possibly due to recovering losses or catching up on the cost of new equipment. A health policy analyst with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners agreed, saying that it was “not surprising to see it rebound like that.”

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... the insurance companies went along with Obama's compromise approach because they knew without it they would be going out of business as a larger and larger segment of the population would not be able to afford health insurance which would have meant these people would have, out of necessity, been added to Medicare regardless of age.