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ACA health insurance will cost the average person 75% more next year

(www.npr.org)
129 points geox | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.785s | source
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brandonb ◴[18 Jul 25 14:06 UTC] No.44604783[source]▶
The ACA was originally designed as a "three-legged stool" of nondiscrimination (insurance companies can't charge higher rates to sick people), the individual mandate, and subsidies.

If you remove one of legs of the stool, the market becomes unstable and you see price spirals like this.

Jonathan Gruber (MIT econ professor, and one of the designers of the Affordable Care Act) gave a fairly detailed talk about how and why they designed the ACA the way they did, learning from a similar law in Massachusetts: https://youtu.be/2fTHqARiV_Q?si=SRC6Np-rjgUgAe4Z&t=679

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getnormality ◴[18 Jul 25 14:21 UTC] No.44604934[source]▶
My hope, perhaps naive, is that 95% of what happens in this Rube Goldberg machine basically amounts to the government paying private insurance companies to pay doctors, which is inefficient but ultimately straightforward.
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potato3732842 ◴[18 Jul 25 14:24 UTC] No.44604962[source]▶
>which is inefficient but ultimately straightforward.

That's an understatement on the order of saying WW2 was a rebalancing of geopolitical power.

Healthcare is what? 20% of GPD. Likely half of that is paper pushing compliance checking rubber stamping that likely ought not to exist.

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getnormality ◴[18 Jul 25 14:29 UTC] No.44605023[source]▶
I was going to push back against this, but when I googled "what percent of American health care is administrative costs" I got back numbers ranging from 15-34%, which is pretty darn high. Much higher than the last number I heard, which was something like 8%. The factor of two variance is kind of disturbing in itself.
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1. zdw ◴[18 Jul 25 15:03 UTC] No.44605438[source]▶
All this means is that for insurance companies to maximize their administrative costs they push up the overall price - from their perspective making 10% of $10M is way better than 10% of $5M.
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2. potato3732842 ◴[18 Jul 25 15:51 UTC] No.44606134[source]▶
Drives me up the wall that the same people who can correctly identify when nominal nonprofits like rich people's charity organizations universities or even hospitals are pissing away money on officer salaries, perks, facilities, etc. because "nonprofit" think that somehow being a 10% or X% profit capped organization can't do the same thing with whatever expenses they aren't capped on.