Health Insurance Blog

Most of us have seen this coming for years. It’s unfortunate but true, health insurance premiums are increasing on average in the state of Utah by 30%. Yesterday the Obama Administration announced that premiums across the country will be increasing 25%.

So why is this happening? Well I can explain it. Hang in there with me.

1. Spring of 2013: Health Insurance carriers were required to submit their premiums to the Department of Insurance for January 1, 2014 open enrollment, well before the Affordable Care Act would kick in.
2. Spring of 2014: rolls around and the carriers have to submit premiums to the Department of Insurance for January 2015 plans.
3. PROBLEM: They have no idea how much the cost of claims that will be submitted by their members for the full year of 2014 will be.
4. Spring of 2015; the carriers submit rates for January 2016 plans.
5. PROBLEM: They barely finished looking at claims for 2014 and they only have one year of claim history to determine rates for 2015
6. Spring of 2016; the carriers submit rates for January 2017 with 2 years of claims history.
7. REASON: the carriers finally figured out how much to charge for their premiums to stay ahead of the cost of their submitted claims.

So why are premiums so expensive? Because the cost of healthcare in America is so expensive (meds, test, hospitals, etc).

We need to figure out how to control the cost of healthcare.