Affordable Care Act Can’t be Blamed for Rises in Health Insurance Premiums

A lot of health insurance companies have been in the news due to their hikes in health insurance premiums. More and more often, many companies are pointing the blame elsewhere, including losing customers and even the recently passed Affordable Care Act. Well, according to an article from NPR entitled, “Health Law Hardly At Fault For Rising Premiums,” health insurance companies can’t really blame the recent law as a reason to raise premiums.

The article cites several examples from small business owners in which their health insurance brokers blamed health insurance reform for the rising costs of premiums. Jay Angoff, head of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says “It would be inaccurate and silly to blame it on the new law. To the extent that the insurance companies blame the new law for rate increases, they know better,” Angoff says. He goes onto say that the new law would only raise rates between one and two percent.

Last month, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote a letter to the health insurance industry warning them about “falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act”. However, Robert Zirkelbach of the insurance industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans says that some part of the rate increases can be attributed to the new law, some portions of which just took effect. The article then goes onto list more likely culprits of the increases, like healthy people cutting coverage due to a weakened economy, among other things. Overall, however, opinions are still mixed as to how much savings we’ll see from the health reform laws.