Obamacare Rate Hikes Partly Due To States Opting Out Of Medicaid Expansion

I wanted to follow up on a prior post about the problems with Obamacare. One of the reasons that the pool of enrollees has turned out to be slightly less healthy than expected is because of the deliberate sabotage of Republicans in states around the country. When those red states opted out of the Medicaid expansion, it meant that those potential Medicaid enrollees actually moved into the regular Obamacare exchanges. A government study showed that the exchanges in states that opted out of expansion had 40% of enrollees with incomes between 100 and 140 percent of the poverty line. In states that adopted Medicaid expansion that number was just 6%. As Jordan Weissmann writes, “Herding poorer families into the exchanges has almost certainly left insurers with a sicker customer base, since low-income Americans tend to be less healthy. That, in turn, drives up costs for everybody. Controlling for other variables, the Department of Health and Human Services researchers estimated that in 2015, premiums were 7 percent lower in states that decided to expand Medicaid than those that didn’t. It seems entirely possible that difference has grown with time as carriers have had to further adjust their prices to reflect the health of their customer bases.”

Please read Jordan’s entire article as it describes other ways in which certain states have adopted policies that make it harder for Obamacare to be as effective as it could be.