ACA Is A Success! Premims ONLY Go UP 3% As Deductibles Jump Skyward. ObamaCrapCare IS A Failure

Health insurance is getting more affordable — but there’s a catch

September 14, 2016

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It’s fair to say health insurance premiums will always go up in America. But new data collectedfrom employers by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) shows these spikes have started to slow down.

According to the two organizations’ annual Employer Health Benefits Survey released Wednesday, this year’s average increase was just 3%, less than last year’s 4%. The slowdown hasn’t just been the past two years — it’s an ongoing trend. Kaiser reported a 63% premium increase from 2001 to 2006, a 31% from 2006 to 2011, and a shrunken 20% increase from 2011 until now.

For consumers, slow premium growth is good news, especially considering the stagnant wage growth that finally broke in 2015, according to Census data released Tuesday.

However, premium costs don’t tell the whole story of money. The healthcare game has always been zero sum, and there’s a catch: high deductibles.

In the past year, employers reported that deductibles had risen a whopping 12%. This means that for the first time, more than half (51%) of all workers who have health insurance have deductibles of over $1,000.

So why is this happening? As you may have noticed, employers have been phasing out the traditional Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) plans, options that front-load costs to employees in premium-form, instead of in the deductible. In 2014, 58% of covered workers were in these plans. Today they make up 48%.

High-deductible plans that often utilize tools like HSAs and HRAs have swooped in to take the place of these PPO options, and have grown from 20% to 29% of the market-share from 2014. On a conference call with reporters, Ken Anderson, chief operating officer of the HRET, said “this illustrates the continued strategy to shift the financial burden to employees.”

Fortunately, many companies give their employees earmarked cash to trim the high deductibles to something more manageable. This year, 43% of workers received enough to reduce the amount they’d be on the hook for to less than $1,000, and 9% even got enough to pay the whole deductible.

“It’s a shift to what insurance is for most Americans,” KFF CEO Drew Altman noted on the call. “Skimpier coverage with more skin in the game.” He noted this was most pronounced in businesses with fewer than 200 employees.

So is this good or bad? “It’s both good and bad,” said Altman, who called it one of the biggest changes in healthcare. “It may even be more important than the ACA in the number of people affected.”

Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on personal finance and tech.