The dirty secrets behind Boehner's 'spiking' Obamacare premiums

[Mass]

Forget Boehner. He can afford the premium hike and has help from us the tax payers. The article explains the way the premium fluctuates with age. It is indeed interesting.

It also belies the idea that young people will pay for old ones (less than 65). The increase with age is still very steep, even if it is probably less than it was before.

This said, as the article concludes, ACA is improving the situation for most people, as demonstrated in the article, but when somebody tells you ACA is too expensive for them, it may be true.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-obamacare-premiums-20131125,0,5241856.story

Perhaps in an effort to defuse reports that House Speaker John Boehner is making out pretty well as a first-time insurance customer under the Affordable Care Act, Boehner's office put out the word this weekend that his family healthcare premiums will be much higher next year than now.
That outstanding stenographic service, Politico.com, swallowed this story whole. "John Boehner's premiums spike under Obamacare," Politico declared in a Sunday piece. The article quoted Boehner's spokesman, Brendan Buck, as lamenting: "The Boehners are fortunate enough to be able to afford higher costs. But many Americans seeing their costs go up are not. It’s because of them that this law needs to go."
Well, not really. Boehner's spiking premiums is one of those claims that may be true as far as it goes, but leaves out so much that it's at best a half-truth. And the contention that Boehner's experience is at all representative of what most Americans will experience under the Affordable Care Act jumps it up from half-truth to outright lie.

...

But there's much more to the story. In the first place, Boehner's premiums are partially covered by his employer, the federal government, which pays up to 75% of employee premiums, up to a cap of $426.14 a month (for 2014). Boehner's premium would be $875 a month next year otherwise.
...
Boehner is 64, which means he's the oldest anyone can be in the individual insurance market before moving into Medicare. That alone makes a big difference in his rate. If he were 50, for example, the same plan he's chosen for next year would carry a full premium of only $459 a month; his government employer would cover $344 of that, leaving him with a premium of only $115 a month, lower than the $190 he'd be paying in the federal employee program. In fact, as a 50-year-old he could choose a zero-deductible plan costing $596, which would make his premium $170--still less than he'd be paying under the federal program, and with a lower deductible! Good deal!

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-obamacare-premiums-20131125,0,5241856.story#ixzz2lho4Wzwl

As the article concludes

Put it all together, and Boehner is plainly an outlier as an Obamacare client. He's way older than the average individual policy applicant, and his family income is way beyond the U.S. average. Boehner gets a further break as a smoker--under the law, the state exchanges could charge as much as 50% more for them, but D.C. is one of the few that has decided not to.
But the real lie at the heart of Boehner's claim is that the typical Obamacare customer is someone transitioning from a good employer plan to the individual market, as he is. The truth is that two-thirds of all the users of the individual insurance exchanges nationwide are expected to be people who didn't have any insurance previously, either because they couldn't afford it or because they were barred by pre-existing conditions. As an enrollee of the federal employee system in 2013, Boehner couldn't be barred for pre-existing conditions, and Obamacare has outlawed such exclusions for individual policies starting in 2014.


http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-obamacare-premiums-20131125,0,5241856.story#ixzz2lhpYfMYB