The Senate Republican Policy Committee released their analysis of the premium increases reported last week by Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina for its individual insurance market plans. And it’s not good news.
Last week, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina announced that it is raising rates an average of 13.5 percent on its Obamacare plans for 2015 – an increase of nearly $700 for a 45-year old. BCBS is the state’s largest health insurer, enrolling nearly three-quarters of state exchange enrollees, and the only one offering coverage throughout the entire state. These premium hikes are on top of very large rate increases in 2014, when average premiums soared by 136 percent for North Carolinians, the fourth largest increase in the country. Premiums for young men increased the most, up 171 percent on average.
BCBS said it is raising premiums in 2015 because new Obamacare customers “are older and less healthy than we anticipated. That means we have a large pool of older, less healthy customers, and rates will increase partly to help cover the high health care usage of these customers.” Unfortunately for North Carolinians, Obamacare’s destructive effects have carried over to people purchasing coverage in the rest of the individual market as well. The insurer is also raising premiums for people with grandfathered plans – plans that were in effect prior to Obamacare that don’t have to satisfy all of the law’s expensive mandates – by an average of 13.4 percent. Premiums for people in transitional plans are rising by 19.2 percent on average as BCBS has found that healthier customers are leaving this group at a higher rate than expected. Transitional plans are non-grandfathered plans that the administration decided could be extended late last year after the public outcry over massive insurance cancellations caused by Obamacare, affecting 473,000 people in North Carolina……
The data released by BCBS suggest that large rate increases for Obamacare plans are on tap for the next few years. As insurers stop offering grandfathered and transitional plans, many of the older and less healthy customers selecting those plans will head to Obamacare’s exchanges to purchase coverage. When they enter the exchanges, premiums will continue to spiral upward.
