Many areas of the US are anticipating a pleasurable change for 2019: the price of health insurance is dropping and the choice of plans are is expanding. That is according to a new report by NPR. The price of the “benchmark” silver plan is dropping about 1% across the US. Some areas are experiencing larger drops and insurers appear to be entering markets they once fled. But it is not all good news. First, some of this price price drop is just making up for very large price increases over the last year. If you are feeling that the prices are still way too high, here is why: "We are nowhere close to erasing that increase. This is still a really expensive market with poor benefits when it comes to deductibles and cost." Furthermore, in 2019, “the average premium for the benchmark silver plan will be 75 percent higher than it was in 2014, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.” The health insurers did very well with these large price increases. Now they may be just buying business with stabilized prices. As discussed here before, they main thing people want is the security of having affordable accessible health insurance. And this remains very out of reach for middle class families who buy individual insurance and receive no federal subsidies. And the danger is that the subsidies themselves are not sustainable. No one year is definitive. Let’s follow this over time.
Read: NPR: Many Who Buy ACA Health Plans For 2019 Find Lower Prices And More Choice
Read: KFF: Individual Insurance Market Performance in Mid-2018
Read: Bob Laszewski - What Neither the Republicans Nor the Democrats Understand About Obamacare