Flashback: Obama Promises To Lower Health Insurance Premiums by $2,500 Per Year

Remember this when you get your 20% to 60% rate increase for 2017. Also, Hillary Clinton said Obamacare could have been called Hillarycare.

Kentucky's largest Obamacare provider requests a 25% premium hike

 Kentucky is often cited as an Obamacare success. I guess it is for those getting their premiums paid by us taxpayers. We will pay the rate hike. What ever happened to "bending the cost curve down?"

The Kentucky Health Cooperative, the largest insurer on Kynect, Kentucky’s Obamacare health insurance exchange, proposed a 25.1 percent health insurance premium rate increase for 2016.

Despite the daunting numbers, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) is unconcerned about the double-digit rate in his administration’s signature policy.

“System-wide averages don’t give a good picture of what an individual’s out-of-pocket costs may be,” Beshear said.

Beshear bypassed the legislature and created Kynect, the nation’s first state-run health-insurance exchange, through an executive order.

“The rates for private health plans on Kynect have been filed but have not yet been approved or certified, so we don’t yet know what the final numbers will be,” Beshear said. “Changes still may occur, and rates should be finalized sometime in mid-July, but we do expect that some plan rates will go down, some will go up, and some will stay close to the same as last year.”

Gasoline prices are down, but electric rates are still rising...

The war on coal is working from Obama's point of view.

Via Daily Caller:

Gasoline prices are plummeting and natural gas prices are relatively low, but electricity prices are still climbing. Not only that, residential electricity prices are expected to hit record levels in 2015 and 2016, according to federal government projections.
U.S. average electricity rates will hit a record high, this year, at 38 percent higher than they were in 2001, according to the Energy Information Administration. That record is expected to be beaten in 2016, as prices hit 12.86 cents per kilowatthour (kWh)– the highest annual average price in the 21st century.
Electricity prices have been creeping up since 2001, according EIA data, and prices are set to rise even further as coal-fired power plants are shut down due to Environmental Protection Agency clean air regulations. So far, 381 coal-fired generators are slated to shutdown over the coming years due to EPA rules.
Keep on reading…

Guess who is offering to bribe insurance companies to hold down 2014 rate increases...

If you guesses the Obama administration, you win. If the intention was to save Americans money it would be nobe. It isn't The Obama administration is trying to save democrats from a disaster at the polls this year by pushing back the inevitable large rate hikes until next year. 

Via Forbes:

Want to know what’s happening with Obamacare? Good luck finding out. The White House recently adopted a new approach for updating Americans on the country’s most consequential law. I call it the “needle in a haystack” method: Bury the announcement in hundreds of pages of regulations and hope no one finds it.

The White House tried a test run several weeks ago. Hidden in the midst of a 436 page regulatory update, and written in pure bureaucratese, the Department of Health and Human Services asked that insurance companies limit the looming premium increases for 2015 health plans. But don’t worry, HHS hinted: we’ll bail you out on the taxpayer’s dime if you lose money.
No wonder there wasn’t a press release. The White House is playing politics with Americans’ health care—and they’re bribing health insurance companies to play along.
The administration’s intention is clear: Salvage the 2014 midterm elections. Typically, insurance companies release their premium rates between summer and early fall—i.e., right before voters cast their ballots in November. If premiums skyrocket—which looks increasingly likely—then voters won’t look too kindly on Senators and Representatives who voted for Obamacare and created this problem.
Hence the White House’s desperate damage control. It almost worked: No one noticed when the regulations were first released. In fact, it took days for any news outlet to find the language and then translate it into readable English. TownHall.com figured it out first. The Los Angeles Times then reported that “hold[ing] down premium increases for next year” is a “top priority” for President Obama since “rates will be announced ahead of this fall’s congressional elections.” If there were a Pulitzer Prize for understatement, the Times would have won it.

Good News: If you can keep your insurance under Obamacare, your premium will only go up 100%

Change...all you have left after you pay for Obamacare...

Via Washington Secrets:

Internal cost estimates from 17 of the nation’s largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent, crushing the administration’s goal of affordability.

New regulations, policies, taxes, fees and mandates are the reason for the unexpected “rate shock,” according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a report Monday based on internal documents provided by the insurance companies. The 17 companies include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Foundation.

Keep on reading…

In February Obama Threatened Health Insurers With Rate Controls: Insurance Companies Double-Down By Raising Rates 20%

Last February, President Obama proposed new controls to limit rate increases by health insurance companies. How have insurers reacted? They have doubled-down on Obama by raising private policies an average of 20%.

The average premium hike insurers imposed was 20%, and while the majority of people paid whatever was asked to stay insured, some chose to “buy down” and switch to a cheaper plan or a different carrier entirely. That brought the average rate increase that people actually paid down to 13%.