Over the past few years there has been no greater Obamacare cheerleader than Sarah Kliff of General Electric Vox. Therefore it was quite a revelation today to discover she had a change of heart and has found her formerly beloved program to be deeply flawed. Is it too harsh to claim she now thinks Obamacare stinks? Well the Vox headline on her article used the term "crummier" as in Health insurance plans are getting crummier, and these charts prove it.
So just how much crummier have the Obamacare insurance plans gotten, Sarah? Let the former Obamacare cheerleader tell us why the program flat out stinks:
If you ask any economist the main purpose of health insurance, the answer you'll probably get back is this: to protect against financial catastrophe.
Yes, the free annual check-ups or discounted gym memberships that health plans sometimes offer are nice. But the real thing you're purchasing with your monthly premium is protection against financial ruin. You're paying for someone else to be on the hook for the big medical bills that can and will pile up in the case of serious illness or accident.
...Except, increasingly, insurance does not provide that type of protection. That's the main takeaway from a new Commonwealth Fund report on the "underinsured," or people who have health insurance that leaves them exposed to really big costs — and who appear to skip care due to the price.
Sarah now goes into the details of the Obamacare stinkitude:
When you dig into the data, you see that this is really a story about deductibles going up — way up. Insurance plans without deductibles are disappearing. And plans with big deductibles that used to be a rarity — those upward of $3,000 — are now becoming increasingly common.
Higher deductibles mean that consumers can still be on the hook for a lot of medical costs even after they pay their monthly premiums. This is especially true when you look at Obamacare's insurance marketplaces, where deductibles greater than $5,000 are relatively routine, especially among the cheapest premium plans that consumers have gravitated toward.
She said it! Sarah Kliff specifically identified Obamacare as having ridiculously high deductibles.
Exit question: Will Sarah Kliff now be exiled to the Forbidden Zone on the Planet of the Liberals?
