Raise your hand if you’re a Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Reader™ and you didn’t see this one coming.
OK… including you… and you… and that guy back there…
That’s exactly zero of you. Very good.
Details from Fox News:
“This is concerning to us that we’re seeing this portion come in so old,” Marty Anderson, marketing director for Wisconsin-based Security Health Plan, told the Wall Street Journal.
Allan Einboden, chief executive of Scott & White Health Plan, told the Journal that the data was “more negative than we thought it was going to be,” and added that several requests to pre-authorize surgeries for enrollees in the first days of their coverage had executives worried about costs.
Robert Laszewski, a consultant who works with insurers, told The New York Times that “You need healthy people of all ages … the program is not ramping up fast enough to guarantee a good balance of healthy and sick people, which you need to sustain the program.”
But I’m sure the higher premiums necessitated in 2015 by this lousy risk pool will encourage those young invincibles to sign up next year — right?
Makes you wonder if WonkBlog’s Sarah Kliff wishes she hadn’t written this piece last month. An excerpt:
If young adults (those under 35) were 25 percent less likely than the rest of the population to sign up for Obamacare, they would represent 33 percent of exchange enrollees — rather than 40 percent. This means there would be fewer young people to subsidize older insurance subscribers. To make up that difference, the experts estimated, insurers would need to increase premiums by a terrifying … 1 percent. Yes, exactly 1 percent.
Levitt, Claxton and Damico also tested a scenario where young adults are half as likely as older shoppers to enroll. In that case, the younger enrollees would make up only a quarter of the exchange market. Premiums would fall 2.5 percent short of covering subscribers
“I had a general sense it wouldn’t be giant, but this was even smaller than we expected,” Levitt says. “It’s not a terrifying number.”
The actual figure to date is slightly less than Levitt’s worst-case outcome, making him the Professor Pangloss of this sordid tale. And as I’ve mentioned before, young people who might have been willing to pay ♡bamaCare!!!’s initial premiums might opt out next year, when they’re hiked 2.5% (if Levitt is right) on top of the expected annual increases. That’s how death spirals work — not all at once, but bit by bit.
Our insurer bailout law is going to need a bailout all its own.
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