The liberal website Huffington Post, that once advised readers on how to avoid talking about Obamacare [1] during Thanksgiving dinner, surprisingly confronted a serious problem for the Affordable Care Act recently.
On June 1, HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps and Huffington Posts’ senior national correspondent Jonathan Cohn about the unaffordability of Obamacare. In the segment, “What If The Affordable Care Act Isn't Affordable [2]?” Cohn admitted that “rate increases look higher” for 2016 than in previous years, based on proposals that insurers were required to submit to the government by June 1. Companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Mexico reportedly want to increase their premiums by as much as 50 percent.
“It’s not clear, you know, where we’re going to end up,” Cohn said. “But there are hints of it [substantially higher rates], enough that I think serious people are looking at this and saying, ‘Yeah, that might be the case.’”
In a May 23 article [3], Cohn said, “According to the insurers, the people who signed up for their policies in 2014 are running up higher medical bills than the insurers had anticipated.” He said this was in part because “healthy people aren’t lining up for coverage” to the extent some insurers and analysts had predicted.