EDITORIALS

Steady yourself

Insurance rates are going up, up, up …

AS MUCH as you might have expected it, the size of the increase in health insurance premiums for schoolteachers and other employees of Arkansas’ public schools still must have come as a shock: a 50-percent raise in the maximum premium for the Gold Plan, the most popular plan offered public school employees.

Last Tuesday the state board that sets the rates for this plan decided that the premium will go up to $336 a month next year-compared to the $226.70 charged this year.

The board says such rate increases-and cuts in benefits along with it-are needed to close a $50-million gap in these insurance plans that cover some 83,000 people in Arkansas, including 47,000 teachers, cafeteria workers, janitors and other school employees and their families.

How did the gap develop? To begin with, the expected impact of Obamacare had to be taken into account, including a $63 fee for every person covered.

Just how big an impact the rest of Obamacare will have on the insured is something that only actuaries may be able to assess/estimate/guess at. An actuary’s lot is not an easy one, having to take into account all kinds of contingencies when suggesting insurance rates, including the insurance fund’s performance in the past and the costs it might encounter in the future.

Doug Shackelford of the Employee Benefits Division over at Finance and Administration says certain benefits mandated by Obamacare-like covering children of the insured for an extended period and not taking preexisting conditions into account when folks are signed up for this plan-were already covered in the old plan. But schoolteachers and everybody else now facing the effects of Obamacare can’t be sure just what its effects will be, especially since the administration keeps extending deadlines and issuing waivers for this favored group or that. Why not schoolteachers instead of only congressmen and others who have an in with the White House?

Businesses haven’t been as vague about how Obamacare is forcing them to raise premiums and/or cut benefits for the health-care insurance they offer their employees. UPS-formally United Parcel Service-has just told a whole group of its employees that it will no longer be providing health insurance for their spouses if they can get such insurance through their own employers.

Why the change? To quote UPS’ letter to its employees: “Since the Affordable Care Act required employers to provide affordable coverage, we believe your spouse[s] should be covered by their own employers-just as UPS has a responsibility to offer coverage to you, our employees.” In short, the Affordable Care Act is making health care less affordable for UPS’ employees.

UPS isn’t the only business being squeezed by Obamacare. A letter from Delta Air Lines to the White House estimates that health insurance for its employees will cost the airline an additional $100 million next year, much of it attributable to Obamacare’s many requirements.

It’s not easy to pin down just how costs will shift and mount thanks to this mystifying new system of health care and health-care insurance, but this much should be clear by now: This president’s promises about Obamacare’s bringing down the cost of health insurance in this country should be taken with a carload of salt. Like so many of his other promises.

As for Obamacare being an economy measure, the prospects for any such possibility can be summed up in one word from any New Yorker’s streetwise vocabulary: Fuhgeddaboudit.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 08/27/2013

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