Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign won’t take a hit over the Obamacare rate hikes, according to a House Democrat who thinks the Republican promise to repeal the healthcare law will backfire.
“There are millions of families, especially in some of these swing states, that now have health insurance that are not going to be covered if you let Paul Ryan or Donald Trump get ahold of the Affordable Health Care Act,” Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego told MSNBC. “Getting rid of something is not a plan. That’s just basically lashing out without any ideas.”
Premiums for Obamacare enrollees are set to increase an average of 25 percent in states that use the federal healthcare exchange, although figures vary widely by state. Republicans hailed the news as confirmation that Obamacare is “an unworkable and unaffordable disaster” that should be repealed.
“This is not another partisan issue; this is an emergency,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Penn., said Tuesday. “The fault for this national catastrophe lies squarely with President Obama and all those who, like him, outrageously ignore the pain this law is causing and insist on preserving it, no matter the cost to innocent Americans. There is simply no honest way to defend the indefensible.”
Gallego predicted that Clinton’s healthcare policies would fix the law. “I think her plan would actually help bring down the premium costs,” he said. “Allowing people to, one, buy into Medicare at a younger age and also continuing the expansion of Medicaid in other states would end up bringing down the costs for premiums. A lot of these premium hikes, unfortunately, are being done by insurance companies and insurance companies while they’re hiking up these premiums are still making billions and billions of dollars of profit.”
Several major insurance companies have stopped selling plans on the Obamacare exchanges where they were losing money. The financial losses are driven by the fact that customers who already have illnesses are allowed to buy insurance, but not enough young healthy people have enrolled on the exchanges to offset the costs of the customers who use their insurance more frequently.
“Obamacare has been anything but a hit with millennials — the group has among the highest rates of uninsured in the country,” House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office said last week. “This, of course, is much to the dismay of the Obama administration — that whole subsidizing thing isn’t exactly working out as planned.”
