I can say that the Manhattan institute's numbers (what the Forbes article is based on) for Washington appear to be incorrect (based on just my experience though), as they list a premium for a 40 year old man to be currently $181. I've been buying individual health care for myself and family for the last 8 years, and maybe back in 2006 it was about that price. A "comprehensive" plan in Washington would easily set me back ~$1300 per month for my family of 5 - under Obamacare the same (or even sightly better) plan would be around $750. I currently only carry a "catastrophic" coverage plan, and even with a $7500 deductible it's still $600 per month.

So for me I'm looking forward to Obamacare.

The other thing to factor in is that most of the people that are experiencing premium increases are on plans that don't meet the "minimum level of care" as mandated by ACA. Those plans that no longer qualify are often the types of plans that lead to the horror stories of people being kicked off of plans after becoming sick (rescission), lifetime maximum amounts, etc. Insurance companies were saving a lot of money due to those brutal practices. Part of the intent of the ACA was to eradicate those practices, which ultimately protects the people that were subscribed to those plans, and who didn't understand they were at that type of risk.

In other words, if you were subscribing to a crap plan, your premiums were artificially low in the first place. It's kind of a degraded case of the people that are complaining that they can't any longer go insurance-free. The law of the land now is that everyone has to participate, in order to help take care of our sick and injured - so that means that our insurance plans all have to have a basic level of quality.

I would bet that if you restricted your search to the people that originally had plans that met that basic level of quality (which is really not all that high), you would find that their premiums have gone down.

(Obligatory data point: I'm self-employed in washington, have had a Regence BCBS plan for $540, and my monthly premium will go down about $150-$200 / month for similar care.)

Some of this is because ACA prevents unreasonably high deductible, unless you get "catastrophic" coverage. It was quite possible that your plan was a "catastrophic" plan. You might be able to get a similar catastrophic plan via state exchanges, I know that it varies state to state.

Old plan: Regence Evolve HSA Plan - Premium: $149, Deductible: $3,500, Coinsurance: 20%, Out-of-pocket max: $5,000

New plan: Regence Direct Silver - Premium: $252, Deductible: $3,000, Coinsurance: 20%, Out-of-pocket max: $4,900

I would lose the HSA benefits from the new plan, which I could keep if I wanted to accept significantly worse terms (with a premium increase of only 33%!):

Regence Direct Bronze HSA - Premium: $198, Deductible: $5,000, Coinsurance: 30%, Out-of-pocket max: $6,250

I don't see how I can come out ahead on this one, once I was able to finally get quotes on the exchange, no other plan was comparable in terms of value and cost. :(

I get your point and I congratulate you. However, please don't be prematurely happy, "because $600 less" is not what will fix you -- the coverage itself will.

Let's hope that when you need that coverage, you won't be treated the same way as ObamaCare website right now is. You see, before you could complain to your health plan, make a big stink out of it, even sue them, because there were private entity. When to GOV takes over, all you can is pray. Go ahead make a big stink that their system is broken, but don't be surprised to get heavily audited, for example.

My point is that I would prefer to pay even $6000 more knowing I will get the quality of coverage I pay for. I would not want to pay less to be hit with bureaucracy, abuse, lack of transparency and fairness the way government will serve me like they did with their website.

It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, including people with pre-existing conditions will mean either that those people are required to pay for the (expected, not actual) costs of their own care, or that other people will be required to pay for those costs[0]. This effect is much larger than the effect of mandating insurance for younger, healthier people who otherwise elected out of getting insurance[1].

Note: this is not a normative statement about whether this is a "good" outcome. This is just a a mathematical observation about the way insurance works, from a mathematical and economic perspective.

[0] Subsidies come from taxpayer money, so they have no net effect on this accounting - it changes how the money changes hands, but the money still has to come from somewhere.

[1] I'm waving my hands around the math here, but if people are interested I can dig up the more detailed blog post draft that I did a while back explaining this in full detail.

I agree with your mathematical observation, but maybe part of the surprise that such math was often underplayed or outright ignored in the claims that premiums would be going down, ex. [0][1])

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/presid... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/health/health-plan-cost-fo...

I was surprised because I was told that this new coverage affordability came from getting insurance companies greed in check.

I didn't know that insurance companies were actually lobying for Obamacare, not against it.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/62541/here-s-the-proof-oba...

So... Why are the insurance companies involved at all? Why are they still in business? That's rhetorical, I know the answer, and I don't like it. We're all paying a middle man to do nothing for us.

I'm no fan of insurance companies, but this statement does not compute. Of course there's still risk involved - the risk that the patient's costs will exceed premiums. If you set the premium too high, the customer will flee to a competitor. You also can't raise your premiums too high, because you have the 80% medical loss ratio - you can no longer just eat the rest as profit [1].

Totally agree that government should be the single payer or even the sole provider of healthcare (though that model isn't as widely implemented (UK NHS, US Veterans Admin) and has it's challenges as well).

[1] http://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Forms-Reports-and-Other-R...

While the insurance companies were generally lobbying for the ACA (although there's definitely clauses they did not support), they are vehemently against Single Payer, since it puts them all out of business.

Its an interesting social phenomenon, that large-scale opaque repricing of a commodity is met with opportunistic ~scalping. This happened accross europe during the conversion to the Euro. US consumers are probably rightly suprised.

Despite the expectations of economists that the euro change over would have no effect on prices, European consumers perceived the opposite. To shed some light on this puzzle, we develop a model of imperfect information in which cheaper goods experience higher price growth after the changeover. Retailers, aware of consumers’ difficulties in adopting the new currency, use currency changeovers to increase profits by in creasing prices. The lower the price transparency after the changeover, the higher the euro–related inflation. Using data on inflation (Eurostat) and price levels (Economist Intelligence Unit), we show that although the euro changeover did not significantly increase inflation, it nevertheless had distortionary effect on prices. {etc}

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dziuda/personal/...